By MARK MOLINA | Staff Writer
While the Brownsville Veterans Memorial Chargers knew they had a good crop of offensive pieces back alongside senior quarterback Liam Longoria, they knew they might face a struggle behind an offensive line that returned no full-time starters.
Fast forward to now, and the Chargers are 5-2 in District 16-5A Division I and their offensive line has been anything but the liability those on the outside viewed them as back in August.
“We knew coming in with the offensive line, seeing how they were all new, that it was going to be a challenge,” Chargers coach David Cantu said. “Since spring football, they’ve really embraced that. They felt they wanted to prove themselves, and they really have progressed.”
The line is comprised of seniors Tommy Mercado, Donovan Escobar and Jose Braulio Moreno, and juniors Randy Vasquez and Nathan John, and has helped the Chargers average better than 35 points and 191.3 yards rushing during their three-game winning streak.
Cantu said the willing group under the tutelage of offensive coordinator Sammy Montalvo and assistant coach Gilbert Meyers has been the perfect combination.
“It all starts with the men who coach them in,” Cantu said. “(Montalvo) works with everybody, and he’s not going to let that line go. (Meyers) has been here at Veterans for eight years now, and he helped develop a good line. We also added Juan Torres, who came over this year, and he’s an intelligent individual who has brought a lot to the table. That combination of coaches and kids that are coachable has resulted in an offensive line that we’re confident in.”
Of the group, Mercado is the only player with any experience, playing as the sixth man in last year’s rotation. Escobar was a defensive lineman one year ago and the other three played on subvarsity teams.
“If I’m being honest, coming in, I was a little worried,” Escobar said. “There were new faces like me, (Nathan) John, Randy, but as the season progressed we really saw that we weren’t the weak core of our team. We weren’t what everyone thought we were. We really have proved a lot of people wrong.
It was a long process, but once the players began to familiarize themselves with one another, it all began to work.
“It took some time for all of us to come together,” Mercado said. “In a scrimmage against Weslaco, we were shaken up a bit. Ever since that time, we knew what we did wrong and began to communicate with each other. Eventually, as we grew together, we bonded more with each other and then really started attacking as a unit. I think that really helped us. That’s when we really started executing.”
While the battle goes on in the trenches, the Chargers’ skill players have done their part, racking up 1, 337 yards and 21 touchdowns on the ground, and Longoria has passed for 1,317 yards and 10 scores.
Watching those numbers pile up on the season gives the offensive line something to puff its chest about and throw back in the faces of naysayers.
“We didn’t like (what critics said in the preseason),” Mercado said. “We wanted to fix that and I think we’ve really improved, and I think we’ve really made a lot of people think twice about what they said about us. I feel we’ve been tearing things up this season, and we are definitely not what they said we were going to be.”
“There were a lot of voices being heard that said our offensive line needed a lot of help,” Mercado added. “To be honest, I think we are the hardest working group of our team.”