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Division II-A semifinalist DCA reflects on 0-10 season from three years ago





DCA head coach Paul Wade looks on from the sideline during a game this season.Joel Clinger/Main Street Nashville

DCA head coach Paul Wade looks on from the sideline during a game this season.Joel Clinger/Main Street Nashville

Paul Wade had no clue what a winless season felt like.

He didn’t want to know.

But when his first season at Donelson Christian Academy ended in 2018, he had to sit in his office and think about the 10 losses and zero victories that now stood next to his name.

“The stress that my body went through and the health issues I went through that season were second to none,” Wade said. “It was a challenge.”

DCA’s current senior class — the freshmen on that team — now have an opportunity to prove how far they’ve come. The Wildcats (10-1) travel to USJ (9-2) for a state semifinal Friday with their state championship dreams intact.

DCA reached this stage last year too, falling to USJ in the semis. But senior center and defensive tackle Aidan Francis is still marveled by the turnaround.

“It’s crazy,” he said.

Wade is thankful for that 0-10 year in some ways.

A proven winner in 26 seasons leading up to his hire at DCA, he had just left a position as Ricky Bowers’ associate head coach at Ensworth; he won three state championships as the Davidson Academy head coach during a stint in the early 2000s; and he had always been in the playoffs, coaching in 11 state championship games with just two losing seasons.

Donelson Christian’s Aidan Francis chases down Webb quarterback Weston Coop in the first quarter of a 50-6 victory over the Webb School in 2020. File/Main Street Nashville

Donelson Christian’s Aidan Francis chases down Webb quarterback Weston Coop in the first quarter of a 50-6 victory over the Webb School in 2020. File/Main Street Nashville

“It was probably a great learning experience,” Wade said. “Of all the life changes happening in my life, it gave me another personal platform for me to tell the kids about overcoming life’s difficulties.”

The lessons still resonate today. DCA had just 19 players in the 2018 offseason: The Mighty 19, as Wade still refers to them.

“If you look back at our sidelines, there were maybe 5-10 dudes (as reserves),” Francis said. “Practicing is extremely different from a depth perspective now.

“And it was probably hard to get 30 dudes really psyched about a game when you know you’re about to get absolutely stomped. This year everyone is super excited, super driven and ready to go.”

 

 

Wade said he used to preach that when a scoreboard is present, there’s a winner and a loser. He realized that mantra wouldn’t work with a struggling team.

Four eighth-graders were moved up to play for the 2018 varsity squad and are now four-year starters as juniors.

“We talked about life and the struggles they’d have as a college student, a husband, a father — and we related that to the year,” Wade said. “These kids knew there were games, no matter how hard we practiced, that we wouldn’t have a shot.

“We just talked about getting better. There was a lot of ‘trickery.’ If we got through a practice and got through the scripts and stayed on time, we called that a win. If we got to a game without anyone getting hurt, if we got positive yards, if we scored, we called that a win.”

Enthusiasm was still always high.

“You’d look at the scoreboard and you’d have thought we won the game,” Wade said. “When the state championship games were being played, we were four weeks into our offseason program, and we talked about that being an advantage. Some of it was coachspeak and some of it was trying to keep 16- and 17-year-olds who hadn’t won a game interested in the next season.”

What started out as a group of seven freshmen in 2018 is now a senior class of 14 — some are transfers, but others joined the program during the course of the turnaround.

Senior quarterback Bradford Gaines and leading receiver Dayton Sneed were among the original group, as were the three current team captains: Nathan Magalei, Francis and Gunner Schierling.

Schierling and Francis are the first two-year captains in Wade’s 30 years of coaching.

“I was watching film of (that season) the other day, and it’s night and day, the aggressiveness, how much bigger we’ve gotten,” Francis said. “Most of that is on coach Wade, he’s done an incredible job.”

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