Prime Prep Academy's August of ignominy didn't end as well as it started. Weeks after Deion Sanders first bought his charter school more major media air time by pronouncing himself the team's co-head coach and then giving Prime Prep a patently ridiculous team name (not to mention incidents like this one), Sanders saw his team fall in its first-ever varsity football contest by the embarrassingly lopsided score of 50-6.
As if the 44-point loss wasn't bad enough, Prime Prep's first half was even worse, with Dallas (Texas) Parish Episcopal rolling out to a 43-0 halftime lead. Parish Episcopal's two star running backs, Zach Shelley and Tre Vance, reportedly spent nearly the entire second half watching proceedings from the sidelines, their work more than done in the game's opening stanza.
If there was any other need for an indication of just how rough things got at Parish Episcopal on Friday night, the Dallas Morning News reported that Parish Episcopal coach Scott Nady walked over to the Prime Prep huddle following the loss to give them a pep talk, evidently feeling that he might be able to do more effectively what Deion and his compatriots failed to do before the game.
"I wasn't real interested in scoring," Nady told the Morning News. "I think we have an obligation to the kids on their side of the field, just as we do to our kids, and if one kid at Prime has a bad experience and says, 'I don't like football,' because of something we did, then I failed kids. And we're in the kid business.
"I wanted to let them know to keep their heads up. Good days are coming. This is what everybody goes through when you start from scratch."
To be fair, Prime Prep hardly had any time to prepare for the season, with those efforts further complicated by a wide variety of incidents that have befallen the school's athletic programs, from Sanders' public comments to the school's banishment from varsity athletics.
That ruling, which was taken by UIL's District 11-3A, is set to be appealed, though there is no open sentiment that it is likely to be overturned. In the meantime, Prime Prep will continue to face off against schools like Episcopal, even if further one-sided scorelines follow. As was the case with Parish Episcopal, those blowouts now may not keep Prime Prep down for long, particularly if Sanders has much to say about it.
"Seven years ago we started our program and teams beat us on average by 50 points," Nady told the Morning News.
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