When most people think about football, they don’t realize the whole of the sport and what it takes to be part of a team.

The Cherry Creek football program is considered the most successful one in the State. Backed up by nine state championships, the most in 5A and fourth most in state history. The Bruins are just thought of as another football team, but there’s much more to it than that.

When you spend months with the players and coaches around you, you build a connection until you are more than a team: you’re a brotherhood.

Even when you have no idea who someone is at first, by the end of the season, whether you’re hoisting the 5A championship trophy above your head, or turning your gear in early, the people around you are your family.

For some people, this brotherly bond isn’t worth the work, time, and effort.

The sport pushes us to our physical, mental, and emotional limits.

Everyday of the week, multiple hours a day, we practice, whether in the beating sun, sweat out of every pore, or being so cold that our helmets are literally frozen.

On top of environmental factors, the life of a student athlete is hard. It takes effort to balance school and sports. It’s hard to think about all the things learned in school when you also have to know hundreds of plays and all the parts of them.

There’s also the competitive atmosphere. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been with the program for four years or if you have “more heart” than other players, coaches will play the people they think will win the game. You always have someone gunning for your position.

The time it takes to play a sport at this level, at such a big sports school, is more than people expect. You make sacrifices. You sacrifice your breaks, after-school time, and time in general for this sport.

These reasons may deter kids, and make football seem like a time-wasting activity.

In our opinion, this is far from the truth. Now that we’ve played our final high school football game and we move on from the sport, we can look back on the last four years we’ve spent with this program and can confidently say we wouldn’t change anything.

The feeling of brotherhood, the rush of running through the sign onto the field while the fans cheer us on, and the feeling of playing under the lights with “Cherry Creek” stitched across our chests beats almost any other feeling we’ve ever experienced.

Whether it’s the adrenaline rush, or the feeling of playing the sport we love with the support of a whole school behind us, when we were on that field Friday night, there was nowhere else we’d rather be.