Marble Falls Pony scores TD as opposing teams work together

JENNIFER FIERRO • STAFF WRITER

MARBLE FALLS — Marble Falls Middle School student J.J. Tellez lived out the goal of many football players during the seventh-grade gold team’s 36-20 loss to Kerrville on Nov. 1 – scoring a touchdown.

Tellez lined up at running back in a two-back set, took the handoff, dropped the ball, recovered it, and followed a line of blockers that was set up for a sweep play to the right side for a 70-yard scamper to paydirt and celebrated with his teammates in a giant huddle in the end zone.

“It was good,” he said. “My mom (Ilisa) told me, ‘You have to score a touchdown,’ so I scored it. I was right there. My whole team came with me, so I ran it in.”

Tellez is a special-needs student who asked his mother if he could play football like his favorite NFL player Tony Romo. But his mother wasn’t on board with him suiting up.

“His mother said that he can’t play football, but he wants to be involved,” said MFMS boys athletic coordinator Jamie Graham.

Graham, however, found a compromise by making Tellez a team manager. Graham watched as the student embraced every part of his duties from showing up before school to helping during the practices to staying late to assist during the eighth-graders’ practices. Graham indicated coaches couldn’t have made a better choice for manager because Tellez excelled in the role.

And that hard work is why the coordinator wanted to do something to show Tellez how much the players and coaches appreciated all he did.

“We have to find a way to reward him,” he thought. “He has been so enthusiastic about football. He didn’t have to come early to practice, and he did.”

So Graham began forming an idea of suiting up Tellez for a game where his teammates escorted him to the end zone and players of the opposing team ran toward the Pony but wouldn’t tackle him.

As the coordinator looked on the schedule, it was decided Tellez would play during the last home game that just so happened to be on the artificial turf at Mustang Stadium on the high school campus.

Graham reached out to the Kerrville coaches, while athletic director Matt Green contacted his counterpart at Kerrville Tivy, David Jones.

Kerrville agreed to allow Tellez to score, and Marble Falls to do the same thing on the ensuing kickoff to make it a 6-6 game early in the first quarter.

When the Ponies got the ball back, Tellez went to coach Corey Kenyon to tell him he was ready to go back in and score again.

Days before the game, word had spread about the play, even reaching the Texas Association of Sports Officials. Graham said one of them told him a week earlier that “something special was happening in Marble Falls” in a week.

“Yeah,” Graham said, “we’re playing at the high school.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” the official replied. “We’re completely onboard to help anyway we can.”

Even Tellez’s special education teachers and others who have helped him attended the contest to cheer him on as he crossed the goal line.

Graham said the touchdown was “stressful” for him because Tellez’s safety was the top priority. But Kerrville coaches put him at ease by saying they were benching their overzealous players for that one play.

And when the athlete dropped the ball, “You can see a Kerrville player pointing to the ball to tell J.J. to pick it up,” Graham said.

Tellez’s reaction before he entered the game also was a concern.

“He got so excited that I thought, ‘Is he going to be able to do this?’” Graham said. “We calmed him down and made sure we had kids who were reliable. I was really impressed with how well he ran.”

“You want everything to go right,” Kenyon added.

Tellez credits his best friend, running back Dominic Flores, for encouragement and showing him what to do.

“He said, ‘You better be ready, homie,’” he said. “The first thing I was thinking about was ‘make it to the end zone.’ I was exhausted.

“That was a good touchdown I made,” Tellez said as he watched himself on video. “It was so easy to score that touchdown.”

jfierro@thepicayune.com