Former Newton South basketball and volleyball player Brendan Duggan felt that after a year of quarantining and remote learning, student-athletes that missed out on normal experiences deserved a chance to get together and compete in a friendly atmosphere.
In organizing and sponsoring a 7-on-7 flag football event through his company, Sideline Views, on Saturday at Rogers Park, Duggan was able to provide a little more normalcy for a much more diverse group.
About 30 people, ranging from current student-athletes to former ones who graduated as far back as 2013, showed up to the inaugural Sideline Superday to play in a round-robin tournament with a total of six games. Duggan and some of his friends taped various parts and kept stats, which led to a pretty competitive atmosphere for people from all over the city and farther away.
Highlight tapes of play will be sent later on, and participants were given a free t-shirt and pizza after the games.
“I’ve seen first-hand how hard it’s been (for students),” Duggan said. “I figured I wanted to do some community event. … I just felt, for me, I wanted to celebrate and reward student-athletes who have been online for the past year to 15 months. It’s been super tough.”
Graduates of Madison Park, O’Bryant, Newton South and other schools came out, while a slew of current athletes represented BC High, Dexter Southfield, Cambridge and Arlington.
Darian Cherry and T.R. Taylor of Arlington found out about the event in Taylor’s connection with Duggan through his older brother. As for BC High freshman Eddie Adams, he and his friends from Brighton came across it on social media and wanted to compete.
“I thought it was a pretty good event, it was a great turnout,” Adams said. “It’s good. Everything is getting back to normal, especially events like these. These are exciting.”
Alberto Monteiro, a teacher at Brighton who played in the round-robin, can attest to how much of an improvement in morale at least his own students showed coming back from remote learning. To have this be open to them and former players felt like the nice boost in community he’s used to from the city.
“Community is everything,” he said. “When you have events like this, people can come from all over the city. Sometimes it feels like it’s only going to be local, but especially with social media, there’s always events happening all over. … It was nice to be down here.”
Duggan said before the event that if he could just leave one student-athlete smiling after the competitions ended, what he organized would be a success.
Mission accomplished.
Travis Burnett
A pioneer in the flag football community, Travis helped co-found the Flag Football World Championship Tour, FlagSpin and USA Flag. Featuring 15+ years of content creation for the sport of flag football, creating and managing the largest flag football tournaments on the planet, coaching experience at the youth and adult level as well as an active player with National and World Championship level experience.
