For many years, American football has been deemed as a cultural institution and a modern version of “America’s pastime”. It is deeply rooted into American culture across the country. As such, there comes professional, college, and high school football teams all competing in their own leagues for victory.
LASA’s football team has been around for about 6 years after separating from LBJ high school. In past years, the team has been losing games consecutively. In 2022, their record was 2-8, and in 2023, their record was 6-4, marking the Raptor’s first winning record, and in 2024, they lost that streak, and ended up with a record of 2-4. The team is working on improvement, recruitment, and putting in more time to better the team. Gary Howard, LASA football’s head coach, explained his strategy going into this season.
“We’re looking at hiring a couple of new coaches,” Howard said. “Things that we’re looking at doing are kind of improving our communication with the athletes and the parents that are in the booster program.”
The team is not only expecting improvements to the team and the coaches, but are also expecting changes to practices and fields. Howard expects the newly constructed field to be a significant help to the development of the team.
“We are expecting to have access to our turf, our new turf field, we’ll have a little bit better structure with regard to the practices this year,” Howard said. “We’re eliminating the travel time that it was taking us to get from campus to the other field we were using and then back to campus. That is probably about 30-40 minutes of travel time both ways that we were losing on practices, so we’ll be able to add that time back into our practices this year and help improve.”
However, the team is still facing many challenges such as recruitment of players, as Howard noted. The team has players, but some are inexperienced, and others are smaller in size.
“I might have three or four athletes that played when they were younger, but the majority of the athletes that we have have just started playing football when they were in middle school,” Howard said. “So there’s still a lot to learn, still a lot of progress to make physically. You know, we have a lot of smaller players, which is one of the challenges we had this year.”
Kirtan Amin, a LASA senior who has played on the football team for four years, explained what drills the team would commonly practice. Often they would split up by position, choosing exercises that train for the particular challenges of their role on the field.
“We work certain exercises for certain positions so skill positions do more lower body to be more explosive and lineman work more arms to be stronger to block opposing players,”Amin said. “For drills we do a lot of cone drills to be more agile and lots of footwork.”
Many players on the team strive to improve off the field as well. Kieran McDonald, a senior also on the football team, cultivates his own plans to improve while on off-season.
“As for improving I have done a lot of off-season lifting and running and sprints and that kind of thing,” McDonald said. “Additionally, simply watching football has been a big help in developing game sense.”
After games, the team would reflect on their play style, along with how individual players performed. This can be very beneficial to both the coaches, and the players as it can allow the players to individually improve off the field.
“As a team we try to reflect back on what went wrong and we go through that game film and individually try to improve,” Amin said. “Then work on those improvements at the next practice so we can be ready for future games”
However, sometimes after games, players may become unmotivated, so leadership and motivation for the team is crucial. McDonald emphasized the importance of accountability and setting clear goals to keep the team focused moving forward.
“I think leadership from players is often positive, if overstated,” McDonald said. “But it really requires unity from a team perspective and we tend to really struggle in that area. Because anyone can lead but if everyone leads in different directions then we go nowhere as a team.”
The LASA team is set to rejoin the UIL program in the fall of the 2026-27 school year and is expecting to face challenging and significant opponents the upcoming season such as the LBJ Jaguars, the Crockett Cougars, and the McCallum Knights. With the new field and team changes, as McDonald and Howard highlighted, the team hopes to establish a new reputation as the LASA Raptor underdogs.
