So. PLAQUEMINES LEARNS TO DEAL WITH ADVERSITY

Instead, Mackey fled from the storm, enrolled at Bastrop and guided the Rams to state championships. Along the way, he earned all-state honors twice.

But Crutchfield, now the coach at South Plaquemines High, doesn't complain. He takes the cards he's dealt and rolls with them. What else can he do?

That positive energy is wearing off on his team. "We’re not looking at what we lost," Crutchfield said recently. "My main concern is my kids I have now. I really think they're upbeat."

And this is a bunch that still doesn't have what a normal football team would consider to be regular conditions. The team doesn't have a lockerroom. Or a weight room. Still, the players go on.

"The kids have been working hard all year," Crutchfield said. "From the spring to the summer, even now."

Somewhere to get away to
J.T. Curtis knows a thing or two about reality. After all, he's the same guy who, after years of coaching football, took a manual labor job after Katrina just to get back in town and help his fellow man out.

That means he also knows about what high school football means to the city of New Orleans. Two years after Katrina, he's able to look back and remember just how important it was to get games going again after the storm.

"What high school football has represented is normalcy," Curtis said. "It's what these kids and these familes have viewed, not only now, but in the past. Sports in general have served as a catalyst for normaly in the lives of people."

To those who thought sports didn't have a place in new New Orleans, at least until the city got its feet back under it, Curtis scoffs.

"In the city of New Orleans, it became a part of life," Curtis said. "It wasn't that the game itself was the most important thing. What was the most important thing was the camaraderie. Gathering together and focusing on a particular event and being able to achieve a certain outcome."

Don't call Jesuit a dynasty
Brett Hanemann doesn't use the D-word. It's not necessarily because he doesn't believe his Blue Jays swim team isn't one, it's that he views each year as a different team. He's probably smart to do so.

"I’m careful with that dynasty thing, as much as a compliment as it is," Hanemann said. "You’re on top, you have a great program and you work to keep that. But the second you fall, it’s headlines. And you know that."

Jesuit will begin defense of its latest state title in two weeks as the Blue Jays go to Slidell to swim against Northshore. It's there that Hanemann will see if a smaller team (in numbers, not in quality) has what it takes. Whereas the team swam with nearly 40 boys a year ago, he's counting on only 24 this year to do the job.

"I don’t call it rebuilding or anything like that," Hanemann said. "The quality is still there in the swimmers. I’ve got excellent swimmers, I just don’t have as many."

Jesuit won 18 state titles in a row before falling by a mere seven points in 2005. That they fell because of a disputed disqualification doesn't exactly make it that much easier for Hanemann. But, in the long run, he's OK with the loss now.

"Last year we won, so we’re going for a mighty two in a row," he said. "It wasn’t such a bad lesson for us."