How ‘Cereal Monday’ started a prep football renaissance at McCall-Donnelly
Football film sessions can be a bit of a downer, especially for a team with a losing record.
But in order to learn from their mistakes, players have to understand what went wrong in a game and how to fix it.
When Lee Leslie took over the McCall-Donnelly High football team in 2015, the Vandals endured a 2-7 season that first year. To make those film sessions more palatable, he decided to lighten the mood with breakfast cereal.
“The kids were getting tears in their eyes. They were getting their feelings hurt when they were getting ripped up for having a bad game on film, so I started buying Lucky Charms and Fruity Pebbles and it became ‘Cereal Monday,’ “ Leslie said.
“Now I’m buying 45 boxes a week and they know at ‘Cereal Monday’ they are gonna get taught what they should be doing and what they shouldn’t be doing, but they’re also eating Fruity Pebbles while they’re doing it.”
Four years later, Cereal Monday is still a thing at McCall-Donnelly, and those breakfast film sessions have paid off in a big way. The Vandals (11-0) take on West Side (10-1) in the 2A state championship game at 1 p.m. Saturday at Eagle High. It is only the second state title appearance in program history for the Vandals and the first since a 23-7 loss to Marsh Valley in 2004 as a 3A school.
“We’ve been talking about it since middle school,” McCall-Donnelly senior receiver Noah Ormsby said. “We went undefeated in seventh grade. Everybody started saying, ‘You know, your senior year, you’re gonna go to the state championship and you guys are gonna win.’ So people have been saying that around us for so long, and we’ve been saying it to ourselves, too. It’s really cool that it’s actually happening now.”
Ormsby is one of 19 seniors on McCall’s roster this season, and Ormsby estimates at least 10 of those seniors have been playing together since Optimist Youth Football. While they’ve always had the talent, Leslie has helped build the program from 19 players that first season to 68 in 2019.
And what’s the quickest way to a teenage boy’s heart? Food, Leslie says.
“Most of the time coaches get frustrated because the kids are lazy and they don’t want to practice. There’s just so many other things they can do that are more fun. I started figuring out that they’re not getting enough calories. They’re hungry. They don’t have anything to go on by the end of the day,” Leslie said. “... So I started going to the store and getting day-old donuts and bread and eggs and milk, and the local stores are helping us out. We were hard-boiling 150 eggs a day and then we bought six blenders and we started doing protein shakes for the kids.
“... We started treating it kind of like a college program where the kids were taking care of their body. We’re counting calories, and all of a sudden you’ve got all this energy at practice. The old adage of practice makes perfect, it really did come true. The practices were amped up. They were also seeing psychologically that we were going the extra mile for them, so I think they felt like they needed to respond back to that.”
Parents and volunteers help keep the team’s cupboards well-stocked, and players look forward to the pulled pork sandwiches they get after every Thursday practice. But perhaps more important than the food itself is the time spent together. Coaches and players get the chance to sit down and talk about things other than football. Drills and whistle-blowing are reserved for the field.
“He’s just a great guy, a great family person,” McCall-Donnelly senior quarterback Peter Knudson said of Leslie. “He always preaches about being nice to your wife when you get older and always respect women and do all this good stuff. That’s kind of his main goal is to help us all grow into old men.”
With many in the community invested in seeing the team succeed, Knudson and his teammates have seen the support continue to grow with every win. The Vandals lost to West Side 34-20 in last year’s state quarterfinals and have since won 11 straight games this season to set up a rematch with the Pirates on Saturday.
Knudson, who also is McCall-Donnelly’s student-body president, said he and teammate Carlos Miran, a receiver on the football team and the school’s vice president, have been doing announcements all week about sign-ups for the bus that will take students to the game.
“We’re having to start putting people on the cheerleader and band bus, too,” Knudson said.
The Vandals are averaging 47.1 points and 468.5 yards per game while holding opponents to just 6.4 points and 101.6 yards. They had their first close game of the season last week, defeating North Fremont 23-12.
“We all trust each other enough that if I throw a pick or I mess up, I know I’ve got 11 people on the other side of the ball who are going to step up and do the best they can to get the ball back,” Knudson said. “I trust everyone on defense that if someone gets a 10-yard gain, they’re gonna try and knock them back 10 more yards. We just trust each other.”
