Matthew Vance has always enjoyed donning his Herbert Hoover football jersey, wearing the school's colors and the "Huskies" across his chest. These days, it's an even sweeter feeling.
The senior linebacker and offensive tackle loves stretching that Under Armour jersey over his shoulder pads. It's clean and new and isn't something he and his teammates had to borrow or salvage.
"It feels good having something that's our own," he said. "We really didn't have anything else."
Seven feet of floodwaters rolled through Herbert Hoover High School in late June, wrecking the first floor and ruining nearly everything in it.
But not those uniforms. They weren't there.
They had yet to be delivered when those rains pushed the Elk River to historic heights. So, no matter what has happened or may happen this football season, the Huskies will take the field in new threads.
It is one of the few times since that disastrous day that the cosmos didn't kick Hoover High in the teeth. The school is gone, the doors of that building closed for good. The lives of teachers, students and parents were thrown into a whirlwind. The community would love some step forward into normalcy after so much chaos.
One of those steps came Friday night.
Before thousands in the Joe Eddie Cowley Stadium stands, the Huskies took their home field to face Nitro. It was Hoover's first scheduled home football game and the Huskies didn't miss it. They always had faith this night would come on the date it was supposed to, even though the universe offered them plenty of reasons to doubt it.
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The picture started circulating around Facebook on June 24. Floodwaters had crept to the top of the hill at the school's entrance and engulfed the lower branches of the trees around the front of the campus. The school's doors had vanished under lake of brown water.
When those waters receded, it got even worse. Mud and silt sat ankle-deep in front of the main entrance. The sopping wet ground gushed water with every step. A layer of muck coated the school's first floor, where desks and cabinets and shelves and books had been lifted from their places and dumped into the middle of the classrooms. All that teachers could salvage was what hung on the walls above the flood line.
Football players and coaches had to pitch most of their gear, including nearly all of their weightlifting equipment. Their football lives became a nomadic existence. They practiced at the Elk River Soccer Fields. They lifted weights at the YMCA off Greenbrier Street, 20 miles away from their old field house. The coaches called the Charleston Cathlolic Athletic Complex their temporary home.
With that drastic upheaval, Hoover coach Tim Meyer said it was the accumulation of little things that led to the most problems. What the team once took for granted - having a locker room or a place to store equipment - didn't exist for the first month.
The Huskies would pack their equipment in a trailer and haul it to the Elk River fields for practice. One day, the coaches packed meticulously, making sure there were coolers, blocking dummies and pads and everything else they needed for that session. They drove the trailer to the soccer fields and began unpacking.
"We're getting ready to go and I look over to Richard Harper, our defensive coordinator, and I said, 'Richard, where are the footballs?'
"Here we are, getting ready for practice," Meyer said with a slight smile, "and we don't have any footballs. And I looked at [assistant coach] Jeff Currie and said, 'Can you run up there real quick and I'll stall them on the board a little bit?' So I get up to the board and draw up some plays and he ran up the road to get the footballs."
Another day, a couple of kids forgot the girdles to their practice uniforms. The coaches had a bag packed full of girdles - except they were all size small.
The solution was easy - get the team back to its home turf. The execution wasn't. The players and coaches thought they'd be back for the start of preseason practice, but the process of cleaning the field took longer than expected. Then they hoped to return a couple weeks into the preseason, and that target date came and went.
There were plenty of opportunities to doubt, but Vance said the Hoover administrators kept everyone calm. The school building may be gone, but the school would live on. The team would live on, and live on its home field.
"I think the administration, them reassuring us all the time, helped us out a lot in trying to stay positive," Vance said.
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The real target date was Sept. 9. Hoover was scheduled to host the Wildcats, and the team wanted more than anything to do so at Cowley Field. The players' spirits soared when they learned they could hold their first practice on Cowley Field's grass on Tuesday.
"We've been waiting since the beginning of the year to see if we can play at Hoover," senior quarterback Chase Stover said. "And we can. That's just awesome. It feels really good, just really special."
Despite every misfortune that has befallen them since the summer, the Huskies have persevered. They pulled out a pair of close road wins in their first two games of the season, edging Scott and Chapmanville.
"One thing I've always known about them is they're tough kids," Meyer said. "They're strong-minded kids. This was going to be a bad situation, but I knew our kids could overcome it."
Friday was the first chance Hoover's fans had to show their appreciation on their home grass, and those Husky faithful didn't disappoint. They began congregating in the school parking lot before 5 p.m. for a 7:30 p.m. kickoff, relaxing near the benches in front of the building's boarded-up doors and windows. By 6 p.m. the lot was full, people parking in the grass along the concrete and filing across the campus to the stadium entrance.
They sat in the stands clad in red and blue T-shirts, some reading "Never Back Down," others reading "Hoover Strong." Parents and children held red, white and blue balloons as the two teams warmed up on the field.
"Football has always been a big part of this community," Stover said. "If we're doing good, I think it helps everyone kind of take their minds off of things for a little bit."
The Hoover football team has been on the minds of football fans throughout the state and beyond. High school teams from around West Virginia donated equipment. Florida State football coach Jimbo Fisher and others came to the Mountain State to offer help. The New Orleans Saints invited the team to a Sunday practice at The Greenbrier.
Yet Meyer and the Huskies know that while opponents will wish them well, they won't take it easy on them.
"We've talked to the guys since the beginning," Meyer said. "Everybody wants you guys to have a football season. That doesn't mean they want you to win. These schools want to win when they play you. They feel bad for you, but they're going to give you their best game."
At the opening kickoff, the crowd erupted as Nitro kicker Deshawn Womack's foot struck leather. It whipped into a frenzy as Colten Rollyson took that kickoff back for a touchdown. As hard as the Elk River tried pushing the Hoover community back, that community withstood that force and took a needed step forward.
The cosmos still wasn't done toying with the Huskies on Friday night. Three of the four stadium light poles went dark early in the game because of breaker problems, causing a brief delay. But the community has come back from much worse. The Huskies came back from that delay for a 43-8 win. The slogans on those Hoover T-shirts are more than just words.
Contact Derek Redd at 304-348-1712 or derek.redd@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekredd.