- March 28, 2024
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On 7:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24, the Rollins Tars Football Club will play Webber International JV at Showalter Field, 2525 Cady Way, Winter Park, in their first game in 62 years. A tailgating party with free food and a T-shirt giveaway starts at 5 p.m. Visit their Facebook page for more information.
A whistle blows and sends two dozen pairs of cleats into motion at once, tramping the grass of a pockmarked football field on the south side of Eatonville. It’s a cool Monday night, one week until history.
The sky has long since dimmed to deep blue — just a shade darker than the jersey Jeff Hoblick wears as he treads the 50-yard line and turns toward his team. Next Monday, Oct. 24, it’s game time. He hopes it’s worth the wait. The white block letters printed across his chest haven’t adorned a football uniform in 62 years.
At 7:30 p.m., it’s warm-up time. In an arresting bellow, Hoblick breaks the silence:
“We are!”
Twenty-two voices yell back:
“Tars!”
The Rollins College football club starts to limber up under the glow of floodlights high above. Some of the players are wincing from sore muscles and injuries. Consider those growing pains for a team that’s had to develop faster than word has spread that it even existed.
Growth spurt
In the stands at practice, three people watch from a lonely corner of the bleachers. Come game time, Hoblick, a former Winter Park High quarterback, is hoping there will be 2,000. Many of them hadn’t heard of the team a month ago, the team’s quarterback said. Eight months ago, the team didn’t exist at all.
But just a few months after Hoblick first petitioned the school to call the team an official sports club, he’s got practice jerseys, game jerseys, pads, helmets. He has coaches (including older brother Greg), managers and $20,000 in funding from donors.
Head Coach Ezra Simmons said that at this level, the team is expected to take care of itself.
“None of the club teams are funded by the schools,” he said.
Absent that, Hoblick went to work organizing most of the team single-handedly.
“Jeff’s done so much,” left tackle Daniel Zellar said, “just one guy, a sophomore.”
That wild spring and summer spent throwing together a football team included an exhausting search for a head coach that only ended in August.
Walking out onto the team’s Hungerford practice field, Simmons starts calling plays through calm prodding and jokes rather than screams and cursing. But that low-key approach belies the urgency of the team’s situation just a few days before its first game. He has just a few more practices to get the team whipped into shape.
Sense of urgency
This is the first week that the Rollins Tars will practice every day. And those practices are coming in earnest. Come 7:15 p.m. Oct. 24, the Tars will play Webber International JV at Showalter Field in their first game since before most of the players’ parents were born.
“We get to be a part of history,” Zellar said. “We’ll be making the stands roar for the first time in 60 years.”
And with such a small team fielding three sets of positions at once, some players will be on the field for most of the game, Hoblick said.
The team’s roster so far has maxed out at 29 players, with some expected to play on offense, defense and special teams, appropriately echoing the type of football played by the first Tars team to take the field 107 years ago. Wide receivers may double as defensive backs and kick returners. Offensive linemen will switch sides to play as defensive linemen.
And they all have to take their multiple roles seriously if they’re going to win games, Simmons said. The goal is to be taken seriously as a football team.
“We treat this as if it’s Rollins College’s football team,” Simmons said. “It’s not like it’s a club. These guys have to play like they’re a real football team.”
Thinking about the future
With that attitude in mind, the Tars have turned ambitious in their schedule, even before their first game. On Nov. 5 they’re set to play Clemson — that’s the big university’s club level team, not the No. 7-ranked NCAA BCS team that’s 7-0 so far this season.
It all starts with Game One. Hoping to draw on some of the team’s past glory — for those alive to remember it — the Tars will have some of their former players on the field for the first coin toss.
Then the newest generation of players will open a new page in the history books.
“This is an opportunity for us to do something bigger than ourselves,” Zellar said. “We want to do something that goes down in history and won’t be forgotten.”