It’s tradition for MVHS to fight for the helmet against Cupertino; it’s been tradition since 1969, when MVHS was founded. And for the last 13 years, it’s been tradition for MVHS to win.
That last tradition has been broken.
Jeff Mueller, the previous varsity coach of the football team, played for MVHS in high school. The biggest game of his career was in 1971 against Cupertino. Although the Helmet was not instituted until 1985, the two schools were still natural rivals. At the game on the old Cupertino HS field, about 15,000 people crowded four or five rows deep around the stadium.
“It [had] rained all week long,” Mueller said. “And there was no astroturf, everything was on grass. And it was just a quagmire. A muddy quagmire. It was ridiculous.”
The game ended in a 7-7 tie, but MVHS avenged the draw by winning the CCS championship the same year.
“They had some things they wanted to prove and we had some things we wanted to prove,” Mueller said. “And we put it all down on the football field.”
Mueller played for a team that was one of the top five in the state, but when he came back to coach in 2001, the team endedits first season with him at the helm with a 1-9 record.
“We had to go ahead and understand that playing football was an emotional game, not just a physical one,” Mueller said.
So Mueller introduced a weight training program. And spring training. He emphasized the rivalry again with Cupertino to make the Helmet Game a big deal again. He wanted to add emotion back into the mix.
Fifteen years later, that emotion and camaraderie is still present.
“You’ve got to have the energy to fight even harder next week,” senior [position] Brian Carroll said. “Not just for yourself, but for the guy next to you on the line.”
In spite of this season’s probable losing record, senior captain Mihir Thakar is optimistic about the success of the team in future seasons.
“Coach [Adam Herald has] got a really good direction,” Thakar said. “We’ve got a lot of potential coming off from the next few years, with kids coming off from JV.”
When Herald arrived to coach the varsity team this year after Mueller stepped down, he noticed a significant difference in the MVHS team and his hometown team in Elk Grove, near Sacramento. Elk Grove was the kind of place where elementary schoolers aspired to join the football team in high school, where the community made a point to go to the game every Friday. And to Herald, what it comes down to is buy-in.
“Are you in here at lunchtime watching film? Are you working out seventh period with the strength coach?” Herald said. “That type of buy-in. ‘Cause there’s some kids who are not totally committed to that, and that shows you’re not totally committed as well.”
As Herald plans for next season, he hopes to implement a strict off-season practice regimen focused on lifting and conditioning. Instead of 10 kids at training, he hopes to see the whole team; he already has the current freshmen lifting with the strength coach during seventh period.
Both Herald and Mueller want and wanted to establish tradition at MVHS. But when tradition is broken, they know that certain traditions can be overlooked. The Helmet Game, in spite of the 15,000 that watched in 1971 and the tears that fell from the football players’ cheeks in 2016, was one game in one season.
“Football is like life,” Herald said. “There are ups and downs, and it’s about how you respond to them and stay positive.”
