Hollidaysburg Football Learns Big Lessons this Season

High school sports isn’t all about winning. Sometimes, there are bigger lessons that only hardship can teach.

That’s not lost on members of this season’s Hollidaysburg Area High School football team.

“Ultimately, we learned that life’s not always going to go your way, but you’ve still got to come back the next day and keep going,” Golden Tiger senior Tucker Rossman said.

Next month, most of the Cove area’s football teams will be in the playoffs. However, Friday night’s game in DuBois will be the last this season for the Tigers.

Even if Hollidaysburg wins, the Tigers will only finish the year 2-8. That would be the fewest wins for the team since Homer DeLattre became coach in 2013, indeed the fewest since 1977.

Hollidaysburg’s only win heading into the finale came on Sept. 30, when Rossman passed for 153 yards and two touchdowns and the defense held homestanding Bellefonte to just 112 yards -- four rushing -- in a 31-0 triumph.

“Playing four quarters is, ultimately, the one and only thing. We’ve played two or three really good quarters,” DeLattre said of the goals for the season finale beyond just finding a way to close out on a win. “Putting four quarters together in all three phases of the game consistently is what I think we need to do.”

A lack of stability has been the biggest drawback this year for a Tiger team that entered the season knowing it was going to face challenges because of a dearth of experienced varsity players trying to make a go against what might have been one of the most demanding scholastic schedules in the state.

Nine of Hollidaysburg’s 10 opponents this season have qualified for the playoffs, according to DeLattre, who is also the school district’s athletic director.

“We haven’t been real consistent. That’s not just with executing the plays, it’s with having the same guys on the field each Friday,” DeLattre said. “We had a lot of injuries that didn’t allow us to have the same guys out there.”

DeLattre said that was especially problematic on the offensive line, where he didn’t believe the same five players started in consecutive contests the whole year.

“That made it very difficult,” Rossman said. “We (also) lost our number one running back (Eli Ransom) and my receiver that I’ve been with since we were kids (Nick Burkey) both very early in the season. Throughout the year, we’d lose guys for a game or two. Then another guy would go down the next game. It was just a domino effect.”

The result was no continuity and no chance for the Tigers to even get familiar with one another. Different players were playing next to each other from week to week. Players might be playing one position one week and then playing a different one the next because a teammate had gotten injured there and they were best suited to fill in.

While the emotional gulf might have been huge, the margin for error was razor thin. DeLattre said the Tigers were competitive in more than half their games.

“We were within three points in the fourth quarter in five of our games,” DeLattre said. “Even against Oil City, we were kicking a field goal to go down seven with a minute to go. Altoona, we were driving -- they’ve had a great year. Tyrone, we struggled in the first half and played very well in the second half. Even versus Bellefonte, we didn’t play well in the first half. It was only 7-0. It ended up 31-0.”

Hollidaysburg was tied with Altoona in the fourth quarter, only lost to Allegany by three, gave up 27 points in the final frame of a 20-point loss to Butler and wound up losing by 17 and 10 points, respectively, to Oil City and Selinsgrove.

Rossman’s put up solid numbers this season and should surpass the 1,500-yard passing mark this week. He’s thrown 14 touchdowns against 13 interceptions. He’s been working with a receiving corps that’s been all underclassmen since Burkey went down; Caden DeLattre leads the team with 42 receptions for 682 yards and eight touchdowns.

“We had a pretty good passing game,” Homer DeLattre said. “Tucker, for a first-year senior starter, has had a pretty nice season and our receivers have done a really good job.”

Although he only played three games, Ransom still leads the Tigers in rushing with 197 yards – he’s just a junior and will be back next fall. Five of the next six on the Hollidaysburg rushing charts still have eligibility remaining.

On the defensive side, 16 of Hollidaysburg’s top 18 tacklers will be back, too.

There’s reason to be optimistic for a big turnaround in 2023 for the Tigers. This season’s travails planted the seeds for one of the most experienced teams Coach DeLattre ever will have fielded entering a season since he came to Hollidaysburg from Corry. He’ll need to find a replacement for Rossman and someone to take over for standout place-kicker/punter Ben Sosnowski, but most of the rest of the lineup will be back.

While they didn’t win as much as he might have liked, the Tigers took something meaningful from the experience, according to Rossman.

“I think ‘perseverance’ would be a good word because, while there’ve been many ups and many downs, we always fought through,” Rossman said. “Even though it’s been a rough year, we’ve had a lot of fun doing it.”