Mitchell Northam

tnortham@dmg.gannett.com

Nick Howard’s southern drawl can be almost be heard out by the John B. Whealton Memorial Causeway.

For most weekday afternoons in the fall, it’s been that way since 2000, when he first took over as head coach of Chincoteague High School’s football team. On Monday, his calm but booming voice echoed across the tiny island with a population of less than 3,000 people.

“Run it again,” he says to the Ponies. “Let’s go. We’ve punted once in the past three games. That’s why we’re working on it today. We have to get it right.”

It’s a bye week for the Chincoteague high school football team. They’ve punted once over their last three contests because they haven’t had to. Believe it or not, the Ponies are that good this year.

Traditionally, smaller high schools aren’t good at football. The game on the gridiron often comes down to numbers. The more the depth a team has, the better off it is.

But for Chincoteague, that hasn’t mattered.

The island’s high school serves grades six through 12 and has a total enrollment of 301 students. When that number is broken down to just high school students, it makes Chincoteague high the second smallest public high school in the state of Virginia that fields a varsity football team.

Howard has the Ponies sitting at 6-2 so far this season and they’ve won three straight games.

“We’ve all been practicing really hard and we just don’t want to lose,” said Voshawn Davis, a junior running back. “We’re playing for each other.”

Before last season, the Ponies had never beaten the Northampton Yellow Jackets in football. Howard’s side broke that historic losing streak in 2015, and last week the Ponies beat the Yellow Jackets for the second time in school history by a score of 49-45.

“The kids just kept churning in that one,” Howard said. “They kept working. They never let down. Coming out of halftime we lost a key fumble and the game could’ve turned there, but the kids just stayed with it.

“I mean, offensively, Northampton is unreal. So we knew we’d have to score a lot of points to be able to play with them, and fortunately we were able to.”

Chincoteague’s goal this year is a specific one: it wants to be an eight-win football team.

Howard, who grew up on the island, said that hasn’t been done in at least 50 years.

But this year, he sees it as an attainable goal for his group of undersized but dedicated athletes.

“I think we can do that,” Howard said. “Just as long as we stay focused. It’s difficult with the bye week, because we’ve had this rhythm going since July 28 when we started practice. We haven’t had a day off since. But if we stay focused, we’ll be okay.”

The week without a game is giving the Ponies a chance to get back to the fundamentals of football.

On Monday, Oct. 17, the Ponies were running through the plays of their wishbone offense, but not going full-speed or against a live defense. Howard wants the offense perfected, or close to it.

About halfway through the practice, the Ponies give up about a third of their field – which they practice and play games on – to allow the middle school soccer team to run through drills and corner kicks. At Chincoteague, there’s only so much good grass for sports.

This is the third year in a row that the Ponies have had at least six wins, but the road to sustained success has been a long one for them. Before 2014, when the Ponies won seven games, their last six-win season was in 2005.

“A big part of it is the youth league football program they started here,” Howard said. “The kids start at about 5 or 6 years old and work their way on through.”

That youth program was started about 10 years ago and has paid off in a big way. It arrived a few years after the Ponies’ middle school football team was disbanded. The new youth program has turned into a solid feeder program for Howard.

His roster this season is made up of 28 guys, but one is injured. There is no JV team, and this season he is starting six freshmen, including three on the offensive line.

One of the offensive line’s veterans is Josh Bale, a senior who also plays defensive tackle, linebacker and serves as the team’s kicker and punter.

“We have a lot of aggressiveness and drive,” Bale said. “We’re just pushing each other to be better.”

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Led by Bale, the offensive line has been paving the way for Chincoteague’s rushing attack. Like another famous team with a horse for a mascot – the SMU Mustangs of the 1980’s – the Ponies run the wishbone.

The scheme keeps opposing defenses on its toes. On any given play, one of three different players can be the ball carrier. The offense has mostly been led by a power attack of Davis and Isaac Haymond, but the Ponies also have a speedy back in John Wales.

“Each three are different style runners and we have a really good change of pace with them,” Howard said. “We can mix it all up.”

Against Northampton on Friday, Oct. 14 at the Ponies’ tiny stadium, their offense worked to perfection. Davis, Haymond and Wales ran Northampton’s defense ragged.

“They couldn’t stop our run game and our defense stepped up when it needed to,” Davis said. “Our offensive line plays hard and gives it all they got, even when they’re outsized.”

The next day, when Bale went to work at the Ace Hardware store on the island, he had to pull his phone out and bring up a website that had posted the final score to prove to his co-workers that the Ponies were victorious over the Yellow Jackets.

“Everybody told us we didn’t have a chance,” Bale said. “They said, ‘There’s no way you’ll beat them. They run you over.’ People didn’t believe me when I went to work the next day and told them that we beat Northampton.”

Most of the Chincotague football players live on the island, but six or seven of them are from the mainland, Howard says. Their school district grazes Wallops Island and reaches up to Horntown in Accomack County.

Howard grew up on the island too and played for the Ponies as a freshman and sophomore before transferring to Broadwater Academy. He still lives on Chincoteague and has worked for Verizon for the last 19 years.

Including him, the Ponies have a coaching staff of just five. He was a little short-handed on Monday, so in jeans, work boots and a Washington Redskins cap, he ran the offense and special teams.

Howard doesn’t work for the school. He’s coaching the Ponies because he loves football and he loves the kids that play it.

“The kids are good kids,” Howard said. “They’re disciplined and they’re here every day.”

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The Ponies might be playing for more soon if their success continues. For the past several seasons, they have played outside of their conference and made up their own custom schedule, making them ineligible for the playoffs. This allowed Chincoteague to avoid playing schools three or four times its size and kept their athletes from getting seriously injured.

But in 2013, the Virginia High School League reclassified its schools into six divisions and reformed its basis for postseason competition. And now the Ponies are eyeing a chance to become eligible again for the postseason.

“We could be in the playoffs, and we’re trying to migrate our way back into eligibility,” Howard said. “We were in a conference with schools who had close to 700 kids and we don’t have 200. It’s a big difference and was just a safety issue for a while. Now Virginia has split the schools up more evenly, so we’ve started to play more and more public schools, like Northampton.”

If the Ponies were eligible this season, they would be in a position to earn a playoff berth. Instead, they will have to settle going for the goal of eight wins, a school record.

Two games remain for the Ponies, and both are away from their island, at Hampton Roads and at Greenbrier Christian Academy. The Ponies feel that both games are very winnable.

On most football practice fields, the smell of sweat, dirt and Gatorade can be overwhelming. In Chincoteague, where Howard has his Ponies working on the small details of football, the scent of saltwater and marsh hangs in the air as mosquitoes begin to come out.

Under the direction of Howard, the Ponies are hustling. Win or lose, that's the one thing fans can count on: the Ponies won't be outworked.

“They work hard they do what you ask of them,” Howard said. “We are almost never the bigger or more athletic team on the field. We have to be a disciplined team and do the little things well.

“The effort is there and these guys love to play football.”

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