Why I was impressed by a team that lost by 58 points

POCATELLO — The Sho-Ban Chiefs were never supposed to win.

Sho-Ban High School has not fielded a football team since the 2019 season. The Chiefs feature only one player with past experience playing organized football, and their coach, though he is a former D1 player and high-level coach, had no previous experience with the eight-man game. And they were facing a Rockland Bulldogs team with legitimate state championship aspirations, under the bright lights of the ICCU Dome and Rocky Mountain Rumble.

They were never supposed to win.

If you had asked the players, their families and closest friends, there may have been some hope for victory. But they were never supposed to win.

And they didn’t, succumbing to a 58-0 drubbing.

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But you would never have guessed this young team was down by eight touchdowns in the second half.

Looking at the Sho-Ban sideline, you would have seen only teammates encouraging each other and rushing to lift each other up.

Obviously, a team’s success is almost always defined by wins and losses. But for a team with such limited experience, the Chiefs win every time they play with the heart and positivity they displayed Friday afternoon against the Bulldogs.

Rockland head coach Gerry Hunter saw it, saying that there will be some learning curves but that, with the good coaching they have received, and the “really good athletes” they have, “down the road, they’ll come along OK.”

“You’ve got to hand it to them,” he said. “I think that they’ve got some really good building blocks.”

One of those building blocks is sophomore AJ graves.

Graves, at roughly 5-foot-6 and 130 pounds while sopping wet and wearing boots, started the game at wide receiver but moved to quarterback, replacing fellow sophomore Zane Tohtsoni mid-game.

The diminutive Graves was half-responsible for the Sho-Ban’s biggest play of the game — a 20-yard hookup between Graves and wide receiver Sky Cree Medicine. He also earned gasps and cheers from players representing other teams preparing to play later in the day when, on a fourth-and-12 play, he spun away from one tackler and pulled free from another to pick up 14 yards.

Then, on defense, he made back-to-back tackles for loss to end one of Rockland’s two second-half possessions.

Despite his being a sophomore, Graves also led the way in providing the Chiefs with much-needed emotional intensity. He was quick to pick up teammates — physically and mentally — while also gesturing to the fans after each play, to keep them in the game late into the afternoon.

But Graves was far from alone in this venture. To a man — err, boy — the Chiefs maintained a positive outlook. They were all quick to lift each other. And as any former athlete will agree, few things bring raw negative emotion to the surface quite like an embarrassing deficit.

Graves was a pleasure to watch, and someone around whom Sho-Ban and head coach Lawrence Nai can build.

Nai spoke about the positive attitude with which Graves and the rest of the Chiefs played, paraphrasing the Sho-Ban school’s motto — “We may be a small community, but we’re a big family.”

“They do have a positive attitude. We try to focus on that — our big thing is focusing on the journey,” Nai added.

Nai’s philosophy, now and for the immediate future, is to teach the kids to keep a positive attitude — “because that’s the most important thing for you to control and that you can control.”

The Chiefs may not win a game all season. They may not even come close. But that does not detract from what Nai is doing, what the team is building and how the program is representing its community.