Cars zip by on a narrow, four-lane strip of what was once part of the storied Lincoln Highway. They head north on Route 31 to Batavia, Geneva, St. Charles or south to Aurora.

Maybe some passengers will steal a glance to the west as they pass a football stadium between Batavia and North Aurora. Football stadiums, size be damned, have a way of catching the eye. This one has a giant white “M” painted into the red seats. The “M” stands for Mooseheart. The stadium, in this age of the occasional college-level facilities at the high school level, is something of a feat, seeing as it exists to house the smallest high school in Illinois to field a football team.

Hardly any of them will know about Gary Urwiler, the coach and former star quarterback who returned to Mooseheart—not once, but twice—because he missed being home. Even fewer will know about the senior co-captains—Floyd Mays, Pedro Gonzalez, Chris Morones and Donald Niersbach.

Maybe one of those cars will pull off the road on a Saturday afternoon, just to check out what is going on. What they will find is a place where homecoming weekend feels more like family reunions than the typical raucous gathering of old classmates.

“I’m a grown man.” – Chris Morones
If anyone understands the Mooseheart dynamic, it’s Chris Morones, the one with the George Clooney gaze and Brady Quinn dark hair and narrow sideburns. Morones, who turned 18 on Sept. 15, has spent all but the first 18 months of his life here. Like 35 percent of the students, his legal guardian is his grandmother. Some mistake the Child City, as Mooseheart is often called, for an orphanage, but only about 10 percent of the 209 residents are true orphans, kids who know almost nothing of their parents. Another 15 percent lost their mothers to various causes, and simply had absentee fathers. The remaining students come from disadvantaged or dysfunctional homes. Poverty, abuse, drugs; you name it.

Urwiler remembers seeing Morones and Niersbach, who arrived when he was five, walking around together and forming a quick bond cemented in football.

“As youngsters,” Urwiler says, “they always seemed to have a football with them wherever they went.”

There’s a bond most all Mooseheart players admit to sharing, and it extends to Urwiler, who led the Red Ramblers to consecutive unbeaten regular seasons as a quarterback in the mid-1980s. The man today still resembles the one in photographs hanging in a display case inside the school, the one dubbed the “Gary Urwiler Shrine. It hangs in the foyer connecting the stadium to the fieldhouse. Urwiler remains muscular and stocky, but his smooth head has replaced a mop of black hair from his playing days.

Urwiler returned to Mooseheart as the athletic director and football coach in 1995. Five years later he left, but after spending a short time at West Aurora High School, he felt the pull, knowing he belonged at Mooseheart with the kids who resemble now what he once was. In 2005, when he learned there was an opening, he applied.

“I really didn’t think I had a shot because I felt I let people down—I don’t think people understood why I left,” says Urwiler, who is also the high school principal. “I got a chance to come back because people believed in me again. My heart was really missing here, which I call home.”

The players say it helps having coaches—first-year assistant Matt Kitzmiller is a 1998 graduate—who understand the ins and outs of Mooseheart’s rigid daily structure. Morones, the Ramblers quarterback and class valedictorian candidate, understands it better than most.

He’s spent nearly his entire life at Mooseheart. Morones can barely contain his excitement about the future. Next year he will head to college and a kind of freedom he has never known. At Mooseheart the schedules are extremely regimented, and all students must participate in Naval Junior Officers Training Corps.

What Morones won’t be leaving behind is his sense of responsibility, something the Ramblers rely on during games. It’s been engrained in him, as a matter of necessity. Right now he handles duties as quarterback and middle linebacker, thus he’s in charge of play-calling on both sides of the ball. He doesn’t rest on special teams, where he’s called on to punt.

“It gets a little frustrating every once in a while,” he says. “I’ll call a play in the huddle and it’s always the same three or four guys who look at me so I can tell them where they got to be or what they got to do. I don’t mind doing it, but sometimes when it’s in the middle of the game and it’s a tense game, I don’t want to be like, ‘You gotta do this.’ I still have to focus on my jobs.”

Morones is not bound to constant seriousness, however. Following practice, four days after his 18th birthday, Morones was explaining to his coaches that he’s now a grown man. His proof? He received a free razor from Gillette on his birthday. He claims a need to use it every day.

Urwiler and Fitzmiller just laugh.

“Honestly I really didn’t like (that position). But it needs to get done.” – Pedro Gonzalez
Take a look at Pedro Gonzalez—all 5-9, 150 pounds of him—and guess his position. Maybe wide receiver? Defensive back? Kicker? What about center? Does that even seem possible? Not only is it possible, that’s exactly where Gonzalez lines up when the Ramblers have the ball.

Urwiler is fond of saying his team may be outnumbered against its opponents, but will never be “out-hearted.”

“Pound for pound he’s probably one of our biggest, most intense hitters,” Urwiler says. “He will do whatever it takes to make sure we are successful, and that’s why he’s playing center.”

Gonzalez came to Mooseheart in second grade after his older sister, Adi, won the Daniel Murphy Foundation scholarship, awarded annually by Mooseheart to children at the top of their classes in the Chicago Public Schools system.

At the time, he lived with his family on Chicago’s west side near Crane Tech, but he now lives in one of the 30 residence homes on the 1,000-acre Mooseheart campus. Gonzalez shares the house with four others, including his teammates Andy Greenaway, Jake Stegeman and Vernon Owens. A live-in family teacher stays in each house to keep tabs on the boys and girls enrolled from elementary through high school. Two more residents are in nursery school.

Gonzalez hated football in his younger years, though he would pretend to be a Bears fan when others asked. Eventually he succumbed to the peer pressure—33 of the 60 high-school boys play football. As a junior, his duties included playing wide receiver, a position he admits he’d rather be playing this year. Surely he’s more suited to the physical requirements. At center, he regularly goes against players nearly twice his size, but somehow stands his ground. Like most of his teammates, Gonzalez also plays defense—outside linebacker—and is part of the special teams units.

“I just feel like I have something to prove,” Gonzalez says. “I am pretty small and others might not have faith in me.”

In the homecoming game against North Shore Country Day, Gonzalez races down the field on a second-quarter kickoff. He catches a shoulder pad to the stomach from a bigger Country Day player, and drops to the field. Laying there, he rises only to vomit several times before he is helped to the sideline, where he sits, collecting himself, and sipping water. By the end of the half he is back on the field. Later, he takes out the Country Day quarterback with a jarring hit. In the postgame huddle, Urwiler points to Gonzalez.

“Pedro left it all out on the field—four times.”

“It’s hard because you have to live up to the tradition and if you don’t, you get looked down upon. We can’t fold under the pressure.” – Floyd Mays
Homecoming at Mooseheart might mean a little more than it does at the other 413 schools in the state that field a varsity football team. While players from those other schools talk about a football team being family, it’s really true at Mooseheart, where practice is the typical home equivalent of heading out to the backyard.

"We are going to be brothers for life,” Urwiler says at the pregame breakfast on homecoming morning. To ensure the link between past and present remains strong, he has the current team spread out among the tables, joining former players who have returned for the weekend.

Floyd Mays, a wide receiver who possesses one of the Ramblers’ most vibrant personalities, sits with Morones and Jim Fusek, a 1983 graduate. Mays learns that Fusek was a quarterback and, while pointing toward Morones, asks, “Could you teach him how to get me the ball?”

Fusek laughs, knowing all about the good-natured jabs teammates give each other. For the rest of the breakfast Fusek draws laughs from his tablemates with tales of the mischief he and his friends used to get into at Mooseheart. He later wonders aloud if he should have mentioned the high-jinks.

Later in the day, Mays displays more personality, bouncing along to the hip-hop music blaring from the corner of the tiny locker room, leading several of his teammates in the Souljah Boy dance in an effort to stay loose before the game.

The pressure he felt earlier in the week to perform well for the graduates dissipates on the field. He turns in one of his best efforts of the season, scoring two touchdowns in the 19-0 victory, which keeps the Ramblers’ playoff hopes alive. They all know their place among the state’s football teams—they’ve been told a hundred times. Most embrace their underdog status. Not Mays.

“It gets kind of annoying after everyone’s always telling you you’re the smallest team,” he says. “We know we’re the smallest team. I don’t like hearing it—but it does push me to work harder.”

Mays, like Gonzalez, came to Mooseheart in second grade. His older brother, Thomas Simmons, also qualified for the Murphy scholarship, and Mooseheart also accepted Floyd and their sisters, Dawn and Basheeba.

The family was living in the Trumbull Park Homes at the time. Mays’ mother, Dawn Simmons, had never heard of Mooseheart, but it offered an opportunity to get her children away from the drugs and gangs ravaging their neighborhood.

“Part of me feels like I missed out on a lot of their childhood,” Simmons says, sitting in her two-bedroom apartment in Evergreen Park. “But if I had to do it all over again I would because the end result, that’s the best joy I can get. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

“Don’s a Niersbach. I kind of expect that out of him.” – Chris Morones
More than nine minutes remains in the game and Donald Niersbach finds himself in an unusual place—on the sidelines. As a running back/linebacker/kicker, it’s not often Niersbach rests during a game. But he’s not really resting. He’s injured.

In Thursday’s practice he hurt his right shoulder, an injury he says brought him the most pain he’s ever felt. It wasn’t enough to keep him out of action completey, though. And it didn’t prevent him from turning in a bruising 17-yard run to cap the scoring late in the first half.

Niersbach is a Mooseheart football legacy. His older brothers, Justin and Morgan, played for Urwiler during his first stint as coach from 1996-2000 They earned a reputation as hard-nosed players. Donald, who packs a muscular 175 pounds onto his 6-1 frame, is emerging from their shadows as a senior.

“It was hard to keep up with my brothers’ (reputation),” he says. “There was a lot more expected of me. But I think once I got to know what I had to do to keep it up I was able to do it. Yeah, it was hard to start it off. But now it’s fine.”

That Niersbach played with the bum shoulder was no surprise to Morones. His performance was even more impressive considering he attended his paternal grandmother’s funeral on Friday. That night he was named to the homecoming court and was announced as king at halftime the next day. A sign hanging from the stadium railing in front of the Niersbach clan—which included Morgan and their mother, Bonnie—tabbed him King Donald even before the official proclamation.

The decision to send her children to Mooseheart wasn’t easy for Bonnie. At the time she was working a low-paying factory job and had no home of her own. Her sons were spread throughout the suburbs living with relatives when she learned about the school from her mother, who was a member of the Moose lodge in southwest Chicago. The lodge eventually sponsored the Niersbach boys so they could attend Mooseheart, where annual costs run in the $20 million range. The school is funded entirely by the Moose fraternal organization.

“It was a while after they had been there before I visited them,” Bonnie says. “I was pretty distraught over the situation. It was quite emotional at the time.”

Joy seemed to be the only emotion showing on Bonnie’s face during homecoming, however. Donald and his teammates finished off Country Day even though Niersbach watched most of the final quarter from the sidelines, an ice pack strapped to his shoulder. The family trait of toughness isn’t in jeopardy.

“If there’s another Niersbach, I’d love to have him,” Urwiler says.

A small cluster of former players remains on the field long after most of the team has left, no doubt reliving their own experiences. The Niersbachs walk past them, Donald holding the “King Donald” sign as he gets into his mother’s blue Chevy Cobalt.

Bonnie Niersbach steers the car out onto Route 31, joining others speeding north and south past Mooseheart. Maybe one of them will stop the next time a football game is going on, just to check it out.

Maybe, like most of the kids on the field, they’ll find it’s worth the detour.

reposted from Chicago Sports Weekly