The Red Ramblers laughed uneasily as the violent soul of Mooseheart football burst to life on a 17-year-old video.
Coach Gary Urwiler had cued up highlights from the 1990 season just after his players watched a big screen barrage of the lapses that had cost them their last game. The differences were startling.
The old timers’ offensive line cleared gaps wide enough for a road grader, and the tailback shot through without a single tentative step. They ran plays with precision, hit with authority, even broke from their huddles with a belligerent swagger.
“That’s more fun than watching our games,” one player said.
All season, Urwiler had tried to get his team to embrace the tradition of Mooseheart football. For almost a century, the campus near Aurora had transformed waves of orphaned, penniless and forsaken kids into teams that, win or lose, sent rivals away with plenty of bruises and newfound respect.
But timid play had led to two straight losses, and if the Red Ramblers were to meet their goal of winning a playoff game, they would have to sweep the final three contests just to qualify for the postseason. Doing that, Urwiler said, would mean finally playing the Mooseheart way.
“I really want to see punch-face football,” he said. “Have an attitude and really physically say [losing] ain’t gonna happen. You do that and I think you’ll have some fun.”
A wiry senior lineman named Jake Stegeman didn’t need a second invitation. A few days later in practice, when a teammate grabbed his face mask during a blocking drill, Stegeman threw him down and started brawling.
“You [bleeping] hold me? You [bleeping] hold me?” he said, trading blows as the two rolled on the grass.
The tussle was quickly broken up, and Stegeman, 17, was sent off to cool down. It wasn’t his first outburst, but the coaches always forgave him. They were glad for the furious energy he brought to the field.
As a player, Stegeman was Mooseheart personified. He had little experience — he hadn’t tried the sport until his sophomore year — and at only 165 pounds, he looked like he belonged on a tennis court, not a line of scrimmage. But one thing he had in abundance was attitude.
“We come out there, people laugh at us, call us orphans or whatever,” he said. “But when we’re on that field, your words aren’t gonna help you. It’s you and me, and for the most part, we whoop their ass.”
For Stegeman, football was a vessel into which he could pour his anger. With the life he had endured, there was plenty to spare.
Chaotic childhood
In one of Stegeman’s clearest memories of his mother, he was listening to her read a bedtime story when something — he no longer knows what — moved him to ask a question.
“Mom, do you do drugs?”
She looked down at her boy.
“No, I don’t.”
Stegeman was just a child, but he knew his mother was lying.
Drugs had bedeviled her for years, snapping at her heels as she shuttled her son from West Virginia to Washington state, staying in one spot just long enough to rack up unpayable debts or run out of things to sell.
Finally, when Stegeman was 7, his mother left him with a friend who called child welfare officials. The authorities placed him in a foster home, and he stayed there for a summer until his grandparents found out and brought him back to Bloomington, Ill.
That put him in a stable home for the first time in his life, but he had grown accustomed to chaos. He defied his grandparents at every opportunity, nursing an anger that became even deeper when he learned, at age 10, that his mother was dead: She’d been murdered in a small Washington town by fellow methamphetamine users.
As Stegeman grew older, his problems multiplied. His report card was filled with Ds and Fs, and his bursts of rage earned him frequent suspensions from school.
“The janitors knew me intimately,” said his grandfather, Terry Stegeman. “They’d have to let me in for parent-teacher conferences. They’d see me and say, ‘What’s wrong today?'”
But Stegeman was an intelligent boy, and by the time he was finishing middle school, he knew something had to change. So when his grandparents brought up Mooseheart at the suggestion of a guidance counselor, he agreed to go.
The structure and discipline made him miserable at first. He’d stand on the back porch of his group home and watch the cars traveling along distant Randall Road, wishing he were in one of them. Though he did well enough in school to be ranked second in his class, he didn’t put much effort into his studies.
Then he went out for wrestling, and the next year, football, and he discovered a hunger for excellence he hadn’t known before. Finally encouraged to be aggressive, he couldn’t give anything less than his best effort.
Urwiler tapped him to start on the offensive line as a senior, and he tore through preseason, taking extra reps at the blocking sled, leading the pack in sprints, teeing off on the slackers.
He could be just as unrestrained with his joy. In one game, he did a celebratory front handspring on the field in the middle of a teammate’s 83-yard touchdown run.
Now, with Mooseheart’s homecoming game looming — and with it, the possibility that the season could come to a premature end — he knew that one of the most special times of his life was running out. He wondered if his teammates understood that too.
“They’re your family,” he said after practice one evening. “You’re out there with your family, striving to achieve a goal. This isn’t like basketball. This isn’t like track. It isn’t like any of those sports. It’s much deeper, if you ask me. I hope they realize that. This could be one of the last games of their lives.”
Quarterback rediscovers voice
One player who got it was Chris Morones.
After giving his teammates an early season tongue-lashing for their lack of effort, Mooseheart’s quarterback had withdrawn. To his coach’s exasperation, Morones never liked being a vocal leader.
Other players often ignored him when he told them what to do. It was easier to set an example with his practice habits and his play.
But his reticence had contributed to the Red Ramblers’ problems at critical moments, when others forgot their roles. So in the long, brooding days that followed the team’s last defeat, Morones decided he needed to change.
He promised himself he’d push his teammates harder in practice and act like a field general during games, surveying the other team’s formations and barking out directions. And he pledged to have fun.
The night before the homecoming game, he colored his hair Mooseheart red and white, whooped like a wild man at a field house rally and galloped around a bonfire waving a stuffed Moose head on a stick.
“For as long as I can remember I’ve been to a pep rally like this,” he said as flames billowed 30 feet into the air. “I’m stoked [for the game]. If we come down with that same atmosphere, we’re gonna be just fine.”
But Mooseheart’s homecoming foe was North Shore Country Day. The Winnetka school entered the contest with a 5-1 record that included a dusting of Brookfield Academy, a team that had dismantled the Red Ramblers.
What’s more, the crowd was the largest of the season, and it included plenty of former Mooseheart players wanting to see if this team, which had faltered under pressure all season, would measure up. Games didn’t get much more stressful than this.
That’s what made the next 2 1/2 hours so extraordinary.
In unholy 85 degree heat, Stegeman and his fellow linemen opened enormous holes, the defense delivered savage hits and the reserve players howled with enthusiasm.
With a big early lead, running back Floyd Mays started one of the team’s favorite cheers:
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“Mooseheart Ramblers, what time is it?”
“IT’S TIME TO GET LOUD. IT’S TIME TO REPRESENT.”
At last, the team had lived up to the tradition. Playing better than it had all year, Mooseheart beat North Shore 19-0.
“We just all came out and wanted to leave a mark for [the underclassmen],” Mays said after rushing for 122 yards and two touchdowns. “And I just wanted to show the old-time guys that we could do it too.”
The squad then traveled to Beaver Dam, Wis., to play Wayland Academy, a team that matched Mooseheart play for play, touchdown for touchdown, until Gabe Kendor took over.
The small but steadfast running back, burning to atone for an earlier suspension, snatched a bouncing on-sides kick and slalomed through traffic for a touchdown. Seconds later, he added another score with an interception return, turning an agonizingly tense game into a 30-12 romp.
The turnaround reached its climax with a 28-6 win over Kirkland Hiawatha in the final game of the regular season. It guaranteed the Red Ramblers a spot in the state playoffs, but there was one surprise still to come.
“We’re not 6-3,” Urwiler told his team in the post-game huddle. “We’re 7-2.”
Wisconsin’s Maranatha Baptist Academy, the team whose triumph pushed Mooseheart to its lowest point, had just forfeited all of its wins for using an ineligible player. The extra victory boosted the Red Ramblers to their best record in a decade and a higher seed in the playoffs, buoying their hopes that they could finally claim a postseason game.
It took a moment for the news to sink in — the team was still smarting over a sloppy, turnover-plagued second half — but when it did, the players’ faces broke into wild, crooked smiles. They left the field screaming with happiness.
Though the playoffs promised to be a thrilling experience, not everyone stuck around to share it. Mooseheart doesn’t allow students to quit activities, but with the regular season concluded, Urwiler told his seldom-used players that they could leave if they wanted.
Some of them did. One who stayed was Colton Bullock.
The quiet freshman tried to abandon the team after just a few days of practice, worn out by the physical and mental stress. But his teammates, coaches and even the head of Mooseheart encouraged him to stay. Ta’Merria Ross, one of his group home leaders, accompanied him to the field a few times as an emotional backup.
Soon he was pounding the tackling sled with malice and stepping forward when Urwiler asked for his most vicious hitters to start a practice drill. Though he rarely played with the varsity, no one on the sidelines was a more devoted cheerleader, his Southern-tinged yelps carrying over the sound of crashing pads.
He gained new friends, some welcome attention from girls and the respect of his coaches; Urwiler called him one of the team’s most improved players. But to Ross, Bullock’s triumph wasn’t a solo effort.
“[Teammates] were able to see the encouragement they gave him when they went into the locker room, the things they said to him during the season — those things were effective,” she said. “It was more than just a success for Colton. It was a group success.”
The team wanted another one, though, and on a Saturday morning in late October the players boarded their bus for a first round playoff showdown against Milledgeville High School. But before they got to the western Illinois school, they took one quick side trip — to the place their season began.
Seniors’ swan song
“Toes on the line, gentlemen.”
At Urwiler’s command, the Red Ramblers assembled on an outdoor basketball court, their feet crunching a blanket of brown pine needles fallen from the trees of Camp Ross, Mooseheart’s rustic getaway. The team had been forged here during three days of conditioning in the August heat, including calisthenics on this very court.
Pacing among his players, Urwiler noted that almost three months had passed since then, time that felt like no more than a blink. Still fresh too were those days when he’d seen some of his players strolling the Mooseheart campus as kindergartners, footballs even then tucked beneath their arms.
“You seniors, before you take your toes off that line, I want to say thank you,” Urwiler said. “Whatever happens today, thank you. Thank you for turning this program around. Thank you for believing. Thank you for making it what it is today.”
He saved his last words for Donald Niersbach. The teen had been at Mooseheart since age 5, the last of three athletic brothers to grow up there. Normally quiet, he had erupted in the locker room after the Maranatha game, urging his younger teammates to play as if their own high school careers were ending.
That, Urwiler said, had been the season’s turning point.
“It was about the first time I ever heard you say anything,” the coach said as Niersbach shuffled bashfully from foot to foot. “Today, I need to hear that again. I need to hear that desire. I need to hear that intensity. I need to hear you living on, Donald.
“There’s no more Niersbachs. You’re it, my friend. I’ve coached them all. Thank goodness it’s you. For a long time, I ragged your ass because I thought, ‘Hey, can you live up to being what your brothers were?’
“You have, Donald. You have, son. Go out there today and enjoy yourself. It’s your time. Understand that?”
Niersbach nodded, a quick grin creasing his game face. He looked ready to chew through battleship steel.
But if football had taught the Red Ramblers about faith, persistence and brotherhood, it saved its cruelest lesson for the end: Sometimes stout hearts aren’t enough. Sometimes you need physics on your side, too.
The Milledgeville Missiles were as dominant a team as Mooseheart had encountered — disciplined, powerful and just plain huge. One lineman looked like he had stepped out of a tall tale, a 6-foot-3, 270-pound slab of stone with a full red beard. Morones called him “Paul Bunyan.”
They pummeled the Red Ramblers, rolling up big yards while shutting down Mooseheart’s offense. With time running short in the fourth quarter and the Missiles leading 36-6, the teams lined up for the final snap.
The Red Ramblers were once told to treat every play as though it were their last, because someday it would be. For Mooseheart’s seniors, that moment had arrived. Two of their younger teammates shot through the Missiles’ line and dumped the Milledgeville running back for a loss.
It was a fitting end. The team belonged to them now, and to Gabe Kendor, Colton Bullock and the rest of the underclassmen. Mooseheart had missed its goal, but the one for next season — getting to the playoffs for a third straight year, an unprecedented feat for the school — had already been set.
As the Missiles celebrated with their families, Urwiler gathered his team at midfield. Stegeman sat hunched over, a hand covering his face so his teammates couldn’t see him cry. He had fallen in love with football this season, and it had just broken his heart.
The coach kept it short. The Red Ramblers had not played their best, he said, but they would leave the field together, and they would leave with pride.
“One last time, gentlemen,” he said. “Bring it in.”
The players formed a tight circle around their coach.
“Chris Morones,” Urwiler said. “It’s you, son.”
The quarterback everyone called Doodle edged toward the center. In a few months he would be leaving the campus that had been home almost all his life, headed for college and ultimately, he hoped, a career as an anesthesiologist.
Football hadn’t ended the way he wanted, but there would be another chance to cement his Mooseheart legacy. He had talked about finding some scared little kid on campus and making sure he knew what the future could hold for him there. He would tell the boy, “You’re gonna be the next Doodle.”
There was still time for that. But first he had a final job to do.
“Hey,” he said. “Rambler Pride on three, Rambler Pride on three. One, two, three — “
The players’ hands joined together, stretching toward the serene blue sky. Teammates no more but brothers forever, the boys of Mooseheart answered in a single strong voice:
“RAMBLER PRIDE!”
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THE RELUCTANT LEADER: Chris Morones inspired his teammates early on, but tragedy and his own inner conflicts caused him to withdraw.
THE QUIET SENIOR: A hard-nosed athlete, Donald Niersbach let his play do the talking until a crisis forced him to speak up.
THE DRIVEN REFUGEE: After fleeing war in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Gabe Kendor used sports to make a name for himself in America.
THE STRUGGLING FRESHMAN: Newcomer Colton Bullock dreamed about playing football until he came to the exhausting reality of practice.
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THE INTENSE LINEMAN: Jake Stegeman turned anger about his mother’s death into a passion for football that could burn out of control.
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How we reported the story
To research the story, Tribune reporter John Keilman attended most practices and every game of the Mooseheart Red Ramblers’ 2007 season over 2 1/2 months starting in August. With rare exceptions, he was granted full access to the players’ group homes, classrooms and team meetings.
Passages describing scenes on the field, in the locker room or on campus were witnessed by the reporter. All quotes were heard by the reporter, except Jake Stegeman’s question to his mother. Thoughts or emotions ascribed to a person were taken from interviews and later confirmed by the subject.
The account of Stegeman’s past was taken from interviews with the player and his grandparents, Pam and Terry Stegeman. The description of his mother’s murder was taken from an interview with Michael Golden, prosecuting attorney of Lewis County, Wash.
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IN THE WEB EDITION
*Find more photos of the Red Ramblers.
*Watch video
of quarterback Chris Morones talking about campus life.
*Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the series.
chicagotribune.com/mooseheart
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