By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 2, 2006; E10
Rich Serbay stopped football practice at James Monroe High School three months ago and told his players to sit on the hill overlooking their field. In the August heat, the coach planned to deliver a eulogy for a season that had yet to begin.
Serbay had thought hard about this speech. The last eight months had constituted the worst stretch of his 27-year coaching career, and now he faced another low point. How, he wondered, could he tell a group of 40 players to expect a losing, rebuilding season? Serbay decided to rely on basic math, and he later recalled holding up fingers for emphasis.
Five James Monroe players had been convicted of assault in juvenile court in May, and three of them had been allowed to rejoin the team, Serbay told his players. Then, later in the summer, five players had been charged in connection with a sexual assault. None of them could return this season. Two other players had transferred.
Serbay paused. Then he stretched out both hands and lifted them beside his head.
Ten starters had disappeared overall, Serbay said, counting those who had played both offense and defense.
"I told them we were in for a pretty tough year," Serbay said earlier this week. "We suddenly had a very different team, and it didn't look like a good one."
That James Monroe (8-4) hosts Rockbridge today in the Virginia AA Division 3 semifinals strikes Serbay as something like a miracle -- one the coach craved desperately. After a disastrous offseason, an overachieving team has restored Serbay's enthusiasm for coaching. Five players learned new positions in the preseason to compensate for the loss of Division I prospects P.J. Hayden and Jamel Brooks, who face charges as adults with forcible sodomy. Devin Bates, the running back who has led the Fredericksburg school's postseason run, emerged as a star after a juvenile court conviction for assault.
The Washington Post generally does not name juveniles accused of crimes unless they are charged as adults or their parents consent to them being named. Bates's and fullback Robin Spinner's parents agreed to allow their sons to be named in this story.
"Because of all the stuff that happened, we're known as the bad guys, the thugs, the antagonists of this area," said linebacker Stephen Meadows, who was not involved in either incident. "That's straight-up motivation right there. We've got more to prove than any team I can imagine."
During the offseason, James Monroe endured the worst day in the history of its football program. Twice.
In January, five players were arrested in connection with a brawl at a party at a hotel near Fredericksburg that led to the stabbing death of 16-year Courtland High football player Baron Braswell II. The five James Monroe players -- including Bates and Spinner -- spent 21 days in a detention center and more than two months under house arrest, Spinner said. In May, a juvenile court judge convicted four players of misdemeanor assault and sentenced them to 80 hours of community service. He dropped the charges against the other player. Another local teenager not connected with James Monroe later was convicted of second-degree murder.
Then, a week before the season started, Serbay learned that five James Monroe players had been linked to an alleged, Aug. 14 sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl. Hayden and Brooks -- a running back and wide receiver, respectively -- were indicted by a grand jury in October. They will be tried as adults early next year.
"It's like you just get over one punch to the face and suddenly you get slugged by another," Serbay said.
The coach at James Monroe since 1985, Serbay felt particularly depressed after the offseason because he'd built his program to resemble a family. He eats dinner with his players on Thursday nights. He invites the varsity team into his basement to play pool and watch football. Four of his assistant coaches previously played for him. "When the football season starts," Serbay said, "the only family I have is those 42 players."
For the first time in August, the coach noticed within himself a sense of resignation. He lamented to fellow coaches that teenagers no longer had the ability to consistently make good decisions. Worse yet, Serbay admitted, he no longer knew how to teach that to them.
College recruiters called James Monroe to ask about Hayden and Brooks, and Serbay struggled to defend them. No matter his response, the recruiter's interest waned. "What these kids don't get," Serbay said, "is you make one wrong choice and you go from being a good kid to a hobo."
In a last-minute attempt to assemble a competent team, Serbay made early-season moves he hardly believed in. He named a sophomore wide receiver the starting quarterback. He put Bates at running back, largely because Bates's father had once played that position for Serbay. He scraped together an offensive line that featured three players under 170 pounds.
What resulted has been perhaps the biggest surprise of the high school football season. Rated No. 17 out of 19 teams in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star's preseason rankings, the Yellow Jackets started the season 3-1. Quarterback Devontae Atkins has rushed for more than 100 yards in five games. His brother, senior Donte Atkins, has blocked five punts, including two in a 36-21 win over Park View-South Hill last week.
James Monroe thrives, Serbay said, because the team possesses the same traits it lacked in the offseason: character and discipline. The Yellow Jackets have outscored opponents by a total of more than 80 points in the fourth quarter. Five times -- including twice already in the playoffs -- James Monroe overcame a second-half deficit to win.
"I've won three state championships," said Serbay, who guided James Monroe to titles in 1986, '87 and '96, "but I'm probably in love with this team more than any other we've had."
Said Spinner, a fullback who was found guilty of misdemeanor assault, "It's like all this stuff happened, and now we're right back on track, where we used to be."
The James Monroe captains instituted a rule forbidding talk about either the hotel brawl or the alleged sexual assault, but both incidents shaped an intrinsic change in team dynamics. The Yellow Jackets wear practice jerseys emblazoned with TCB, for Tough City Boys. Players sometimes read old newspaper articles before games to, Bates said, "remember what we were feeling like over the summer."
Brooks and Hayden aren't allowed on school property, but they come to almost every James Monroe home game, players said. The two teenagers bring lawn chairs and watch from an adjacent field. During halftime, some players walk over to them and exchange high-fives through a fence.
"I feel for them, because I remember what that was like," Bates said. "The tough times make you stronger, and I think that's why this team's gotten so close. Together, we've been through one struggle after another."