By God's Grace!

Forty-nine years ago this Dec. 9th the Fairfax Red Devil football team won a State Championship. They won on the last play of the game by scoring on a 77-yard touchdown pass defeating a very good Okeene team.

With 4 seconds to go in the game Okeene had the ball on Fairfax's 23-yard line and the game tied 7-7. There was a strong wind going against the Whippets and it would be quite reasonable to think they would down the ball settling for overtime.

But to the surprise of many, Okeene tried to hand the ball off to their running back. Lo and behold, we e stunted a linebacker who met the quarterback and running back as the handoff was being made. There was a fumble and Fairfax recovered.

As the head coach of the Red Devils I decided to call a timeout so we could all get on the same page for the last play of regulation. My first thought was to simply have our quarterback take a snap and down the ball (ending the regulation period confident we would win the overtime period).

I then turned to the assistant coaches just to verify my decision was the best one to make.

But, then, by God's grace, a new thought came to mind. We had ended every practice with a special pass play we had not shown all season. It was "Shotgun, Rome Split, 818 lookback". A play where we lined up our 6'5", tight end wide to the left as a single receiver. We lined up two recievers wide to the right, with our QB in shotgun position with a running back. The QB was to take the snap, look to the right, and then, look back to see if our 6'5" stud was open.

There is more to the story but, suffice it to say, we threw the ball to the receiver on the left (who was flying down the field open). It was a perfect pass caught aroud midfield and a foot race ensued between our receiver and Okeene's free safety (who was fast and had the angle on our receiver).

Bottom line is we scored with no time left and won the State Championship!

Below is a photo of the Fairfax team who, by God's Grace, produced a very powerful lifetime memory!