What comes to mind when you think about American football? Violence? Physicality? Raw strength? The popular idea surrounding this beloved sport is that good teams win on the basis of pure muscle, and while that sentiment might be a critical aspect of a team’s success, Brighton’s own junior varsity football squad has proven that being creative with the football can yield just as high of results.
Heading into their 2025 season, the group–largely consisting of sophomores–set out on a mission for a winning season, just as they had done the year before as freshmen. However, an upgrade in competition level also meant a change in coaching, and this season, the JV staff would be turning offensive play-calling duties over to Head Coach Brad Lilly for the first time during his tenure at Brighton.
While simultaneous changes for both the incoming players and the already-existing staff can create instability, Lilly took this opportunity to completely revamp the offense. Notably, this included the introduction of numerous creative trick plays, or plays in which the offense performs something unconventional in the hopes of tricking the defense. This was a gamble, as the high amount of practice, education and skill it takes to implement these advanced calls makes them incredibly difficult to pull off at this stage of football.
However, Lilly had confidence in his players, echoing the sentiment that “at the JV level… the [opposing] defenses are susceptible to them.” He anticipated that because of this learning curve, they would be able to catch adversaries off guard.
He was right.
Starting with the first game of the season, the team ran doubles passes, where the ball is first passed backwards before being launched downfield, and reverses, where a fake handoff is executed before another player takes the ball the opposite direction. This ultimately led to a 35-24 win against Dexter High School on Aug. 27, and the team never looked back, winning six their games nine from there and utilizing this section of the playbook in each contest.
From the perspective of the players, the trust the coaches had in them to execute these plays provided them with a huge boost in confidence. For quarterback and sophomore Jackson Buckley, he believes this staff put them in the best opportunity to succeed: “Coach Lilly is a great coach… I just think he is doing what is best for us.”
“It’s really fun… if we can do that with our team; it benefits us,” Buckley added.
Reflecting on this season’s journey, Lilly said that it took significant work to get to this point.
“We started really early on practicing them… every day in practice, we have a five-minute session to rep them,” Lilly said.
That being said, the ability of this group to actually execute on these tall tasks impressed the staff greatly, and the head coach has high expectations for these players in the coming seasons.
“They got a bright future ahead of them,” Lilly said. “I think it’s going to be great to watch them going forward.”
