Too much good for Woerner to focus on any pain

MARBLE FALLS — It’s Wednesday night. The Mustangs have one more practice before they face one of the high school world’s best football teams for the final game of the season, and starting quarterback Thor Woerner has a sprained ankle.

He lowers his right foot, swollen and as big as a grapefruit, into a bucket of ice. “Doesn’t it hurt?” someone asks.

“Nah,” he laughs. He points to a nasty scar on his left ankle, which he broke his freshman year. “Now that, that hurt.” 

That’s just Woerner. As he alternates soaking his ankle in a bucket of ice and a tub of 110-degree water, he remains calm and friendly during the conversation, as if he were receiving spa treatments instead of nursing an injury.

He refuses to focus on the pain.

He’s asked to reflect on his senior season, the Mustangs’ District 25-4A record and what it will be like to play his final high school contest, but all he can think about is how excited — that’s right, excited —  he is to play Lake Travis Friday.

“For the last game, we’ve just got to make the most of it, and I wouldn’t want to be playing anyone else but Lake Travis,” he said. “They’re who I want to play, they’re why I play football, and lots of teams don’t get the opportunity to play the best team in the state at all.”

Again, he just won’t focus on the pain.

But make no mistake, there has been a lot of pain. The Mustangs lost their first two district games in heartbreaking overtime matches, and have seen only one district win against Lampasas. Playing both quarterback and linebacker, Woerner often shouldered much of the responsibility for defeats in post-game interviews. But, he’s learned that in football, as in life, “it doesn’t always go the way you like it to.”

“You’d like to make the playoffs your senior season, but you can’t change the past,” he says.

No, you can only focus on the present, just as Woerner has his eyes set on Lake Travis: “Last game or not, it’s still a game, and we’ve got to prepare and take what they give us.”

Losses aside, Woerner assures fans there are plenty of good memories, such as beating long-time rival Burnet at home in the third week of the season, but it’s the moments that fans didn’t see that will help him remember his senior season years from now. The practices, the pep talks, even reading to children at elementary schools on Tuesday mornings help Woerner say he still “thoroughly enjoyed the season.”

“There are plenty of memories that didn’t happen on Friday nights that altogether overshadow the negatives,” he says.

One of those positives includes playing for his father, head coach Cord Woerner. Football is a way of life for the Woerner household. Woerner remembers when his son would come home from his practices at five years old and draw up his own playbooks, but it’s their collaborative effort over the years the elder Woerner will always treasure.

“I’m not going to lie, it’s breaking me up that this will be the last chance I get to coach him,” Woerner said. “I’ve been incredibly blessed to get to enjoy doing what I do and get him to be a part of that. He may be one of the most focused and dedicated athletes I’ve ever had a chance to coach and I’ve been very blessed.”

Added Woerner: “His mom, Kimberly, and (his younger siblings) Zed and Aspen and I have always just been incredibly proud of what he’s done and who he is.”

Woerner’s tremendous talent doesn’t start and end on Fridays, either. He’s ranked sixth in a class of 239 students with a 6.27 grade point average on a 6.0 scale. He also serves as treasurer for the National Honor Society, plays catcher for the baseball team and is a member of the Interact club. He has sent his application to schools including Texas A&M, Texas State and Baylor, hoping to keep football in his life for four more years. Another possibility? Ivy-league university Brown, where he says he has “talked with the coach a little bit.”

But of course, Woerner is quick to bring people back to the present and remind them the task at hand is Lake Travis.

“I would like going out on top and knocking off the number one team,” he says, “but I’ll always remember the guys, the fan support and the wins.” 

Photo by Virgil Belk/Hill Country Sports Images.