Youth football team rescues two people from overturned car on highway
A group of young football players from Idaho pulled off a heck of a feat this week at the Bay Area Spring Football League Tournament of Champions.
On Monday, the Boise Black Knights — a team of 12, 13 and 14-year-old boys — became sporting heroes, winning a huge regional competition hundreds of miles from home. As their caravan of three vans and an RV drove up Route 95 on Tuesday, they were bedecked in sporting glory like gridiron Caesars returning from Gaul.
On their way home, they got to be heroes in quite a different sense.
As they made their way up the highway, they encountered an overturned car with two people trapped inside.
So they did the only thing that a cohort of strong young men could do; they propped up the upside-down vehicle, hauling the couple inside out of the car and to safety.
TEAMWORK IN ACTION: The Boise Black Knights, an Idaho youth football team, acted quickly to help car crash victims. The players worked together to free a man and then lift the car to pull a woman to safety. https://t.co/0ErbuLeTtA pic.twitter.com/TZCN5rT8lo
— Action News on 6abc (@6abc) May 31, 2018
Head coach Rudy Jackson didn’t mince words about what the boys in his charge had done.
“We had to stop and become heroes. It was just a little adversity,” Jackson said, according to the Idaho Statesman. “It’s almost an unreal story.”
Just a little adversity? The last time a Black Knight made an understatement like that, King Arthur had just removed four of his limbs.
Regan Magill, one of the players, was tasked with recording the event on video, and as with Caesar in Gaul, Magill spoke to the moral certainty of his team’s task.
“We stopped because we care about others before ourselves,” Magill said. “We just wanted to know if they were OK. It wasn’t really something we thought about. We just instantly pulled over.”
Magill continued, “It just felt amazing that we could do what we did because I don’t want to imagine what would happen if we were not there to help.”
Jackson, meanwhile, remained more than a bit awed by the boys’ selfless nature.
“I’m more than proud. I’m at a loss for words,” Jackson said. “They got out of the car like they were supposed to do that … it’s a great bunch of kids.”
It’s kind of mind-boggling that there was the possibility for an “even better” after the season those kids had.
The Black Knights stormed through the Rocky Mountain Youth Football League, going 11-0 on the season.
They won the regionals of the American Youth Football — the tackle football equivalent of something like Babe Ruth League baseball — qualifying them for the tournament of champions in San Jose.
Then, they smoked the San Jose Hit Squad in the Hit Squad’s hometown to win the national championship.
All that in and of itself would’ve been enough to put them in the higher tier of the stories-to-tell-the-grandkids power rankings.
But to then help out a couple on the highway and be humble about it in a what-else-were-we-supposed-to-do-way?
That’s the kind of stuff that, if Hollywood made it into a movie, nobody would believe it.
It would make a heck of a movie though, and whoever wrote the script wouldn’t even have to make a word of it up to turn the protagonists into true cinematic heroes.
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