Resurrection Christian’s first-ever “Friday Night Lights” game an evening to remember

LOVELAND – The Resurrection Christian football team has long felt like a team with no place to call home, but that changed when the Cougars kicked off the 2021 season on their own campus Friday night.

Never previously having the facilities to host a Friday night home game, Resurrection Christian’s football team, student body and community finally got a taste of that “Friday Night Lights” feeling when the now No. 1-ranked Cougars won 42-0 over Sterling. They’ve won plenty of games – home games, too – in recent years, just not at Resurrection Christian. Not at their true home.

Turning an open field in front of the school into a suitable nighttime football playing surface in a short amount of time took a lot of work that seemingly continued right up to kickoff on Friday night, and the result even still had a quirky makeshift feel to it. And senior Eddie Lemos said it felt unexpectedly bizarre to not hop on a bus to play a football game for the first time.

But after Friday night, the Cougars are definitely on board.

“It was the greatest experience I’ve had yet in high school, honestly,” Lemos said. “We’ve got our own student section here at our own place. You can see the school in the background and play for your own school on your own field. The atmosphere was just unbelievable and I could have never imagined this going through my years here before.

“This was really, really cool.”

Until Friday night, the Cougars have played their home games at Windsor, Severance, French Field, Fossil Ridge, Loveland Sports Park, whatever was available. Even without any real home-field advantage to speak of, they’ve posted a 27-4 record and reached the Class 2A semifinals in each of the past three seasons.

But Friday’s game was different in so many ways.

The season opener also was Bob Mauck’s first as the new head coach at Resurrection Christian after coming over from nearby Loveland, where he was offensive coordinator on a 4A state championship team in 2020 alongside his brother and head coach, Jeff Mauck. For his first game as a head coach, Mauck said he couldn’t have imagined a more invigorating atmosphere.

“We had this crazy idea that we wanted to bring the games here,” Mauck said. “These kids here, they come from everywhere around the area, so this is our only glue that ties them together. So, to see it come to fruition and to see all these people here in the community, it’s just unbelievable. The kids have all went to different places to play their home games and for them to come out of their own locker room and see a crowd like this, that’s what high school sports are about.

“They deserved this night.”

Resurrection Christian athletic director Dan Knab said it took a lot of help from members of the school’s community to make Friday’s game happen at Resurrection Christian. In a matter of months, the school erected six sets of lights atop 40-foot telephone poles. The rest of the playing-surface lighting at either end of the field was supplied by portable construction lights, something the school had tried before in order to have practice.

Liberty Common’s field in Fort Collins is currently under construction, so neighboring school lent Resurrection Christian its bleachers. Re-seeding the field outside the school and keeping everyone off the growing grass was a significant undertaking.

It was all worth it.

“Coach Mauck came up to me and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about getting our football back at our campus?’” Knab said. “I didn’t know how we were going to do that because all we had was some flat land here, some field goals that were bent and a brown field filled with divots. But we’re a small private school smack-dab in the middle of four school districts and we go everywhere else to play, and it felt important for us to build our community and our Cougar family here on campus. So, we moved mountains. We got these lights installed, we got the goal posts straightened, we added two rooms to our press box and we fixed the field, all in a couple months.

“We’ve got this Field of Dreams type of feel and it’s given us this special environment.”

The Cougars plan to play all of their home games at Resurrection Christian this season. Next year, the school hopes to start the build for a new athletic complex.

“This is a momentum-builder,” Knab said. “We wanted to show people that when we do something, we do it right, we do it with excellence, with the best sportsmanship and we just want to perpetuate the joy of the game.”