To the Editor:
Thank you for your story on the State Champion West Potomac High School football teams of 1989-1990. I thought your story left out the most important impact of West Potomac’s outstanding football program.
I was in the Class of 1989 at West Potomac High School. Our class was the very first graduating class to attend West Potomac High School for all four years. When we started in the Fall of 1984, West Potomac had just risen from a huge community conflict created by merging Fort Hunt H.S. with Groveton H.S. It was probably the greatest community conflict Mt. Vernon has ever seen and makes today’s school boundary disputes look like child’s play.
While I was struggling to assimilate from eighth grade to being a lowly freshman in my new school, the three upper classes were busy acclimating to new teachers, new peer groups, and for half of the students, a new building. Many students were angry that all traces of the identity of their old schools, with which they held deep loyalty, had been completely erased. Many students were working through their assumptions about the kids from "the other school," previously their neighborhood rivals which were only intensified by the merger conflict, and overcoming those preconceptions.
Football helped bring the school and the community together. In September 1984, West Potomac was a blank slate. The incoming students had voted on the names for West Potomac and Carl Sandberg and we had brand new mascots, colors, and uniforms. The football team had a new band director, Roy Holder, who wrote a new fight song for the school. Our marching band didn’t have uniforms so in 1984, we marched in blue rugby shirts, white Dickies, and we wore white styrofoam hats. In 1984, fall football was the first time we all came together and cheered together for our new school - West Potomac.
During my first three years there, the band program, both the marching and symphonic band, became one of the best in Virginia and the football program became one of the best in Virginia. In the fall of my senior year in 1988, Dan Meier was my guidance counselor helping me with my college choices and West Potomac football had started to come of age going 9-3 with quarterback Kiluu Davis, sweeping the Gunston District, and losing in Northern Virginia Division 6 Championship to an undefeated Robinson – a school which had double as many students as we did, and where Dan Meier is ironically now the principal. The 1990 place kicker mentioned in your story, Ben Nowak, came to JMU, as I did, and talked me into rushing his fraternity where we made lifelong friendships. The teams that won the state championship in the two years after I left were composed of the first two classes to attend Carl Sandburg Intermediate School, and they had what is now the "typical" West Potomac pyramid experience.
What your article lacked was the broader story of how the greater Mt. Vernon community owes Dan Meier tremendous credit, not just for what he taught his players or for what his teams accomplished, or even what other students received from his counseling (such as myself). He and his teams deserve acknowledgement for helping to bring together a fractured community and create a critical community institution by giving us some of the best high school football teams in Northern Virginia to cheer for when we here needed it the most.
Scott A. Surovell
West Potomac H.S. Class of 1989