Ocoee Knights, Legacy Eagles relish winning seasons

By Steven Ryzewski
| 5:33 p.m. November 12, 2015

Sports

OCOEE The two schools sit about a mile apart and, though their size and scope of opponents are decidedly different, one thing the football programs at Ocoee High and Legacy Charter have in common is the 6-4 record each finished with this fall.

The two programs, one in Class 7A and the other in the Sunshine State Athletic Conference, can each count the 2015 campaign as a success. The Knights secured their first winning season since 2009 and their second-highest win total in program history, and the Eagles secured their first winning season — ever.

“(It did) give the boys a taste of what it feels like to have a winning season and to feel like we could play with anybody,” said Legacy head coach and athletic director Jarrett Wiggers, reflecting on the value of the season.

Though it was the first winning season in the program’s four-year history, it still may be looked back upon a with a tinge of disappointment. Legacy finished the SSAC’s eight-game regular season with a record of 6-2, leaving the Eagles in a three-way tie with CFCA and Orangewood for the Coastal Orange Division’s second playoff spot. Per the SSAC’s tiebreaker rules, the Rams got the berth.

“One bad game can keep you out of the playoff,” said Wiggers. “For us, it was hard to get over the disappointment of not getting into the playoff, but ... we saw our underclassmen playing well.”

Perhaps most encouraging for Legacy, the Eagles will get back their quarterback tandem of Gehrig Chambless and Hilton Lamprecht next fall. But it will also lose arguably the program’s best athlete, Brian Carmean, and also the most highly recruited player in its history, James Updike.

Ocoee, too, came up short of the playoffs and has one particular loss that might stir thoughts of “what if?” The Knights fell to eventual district champion Hagerty Oct. 2, 28-17, effectively ending their postseason hopes despite a four-game winning streak after that defeat.

Still, for seniors who won just seven games in their first three years with the program, to win nearly that many games this fall was quite an achievement.

“The seniors have got a lot to be proud of,” first-year head coach Ben Bullock said. “I wish I had some of these seniors for another couple years.”

The Knights took a tough loss to rival West Orange, 46-7, Nov. 6 in their finale. The blowout somewhat dampened the feel-good season, but Bullock implored his players to keep perspective.

“These guys have got to look at the big picture of what they’ve done and what they’ve got in the future,” Bullock said. “As the season went along, our expectation level rose and rose and rose.”

Ocoee will lose 23 seniors, many starters. The linebacking corps in particular will be hit hard by the losses of standouts such as Zachary Fox and Antonio Vargas.

So although fresh faces will be asked to pick up where the senior class left off in turning the program around, Bullock is optimistic that things are heading in the right direction.

“They saw some results, and they saw that the process has an end result and it works — and it’s also never-ending,” Bullock said. “We have not arrived at all. So we’ve got to go through the process over the offseason … we can’t take a step back.”