Doyle Rules Breakfast Club After Saugus Victory

Before the Saugus-Hart high school football game Friday night, first-year Saugus Coach Jack Bowman gave his team a motivational talk in the locker room.

Saugus had not beaten Hart in 10 years and Bowman let his team know that a new era was about to begin. His words were directed especially at the seniors.

“One day, years from now, you’re going to be sitting with a (former) player from Hart High and you’re going to turn to him and say, ‘Remember that night on Oct. 4 when we rocked you? Remember that?’ ” Bowman said. “Well, this is your senior year and this is the time for you to make it happen.”

David Doyle, Saugus’s 5-foot-10, 170-pound tailback and safety, smiled to himself. He knew that he would not have to wait years from now. He knew that he had only to wait until Saturday morning.

Doyle, a senior, is good friends with Hart tailback Deriek Charles. The two regularly eat breakfast together on Saturday mornings and discuss the previous night’s activities on the football field.

Thus inspired, Doyle spearheaded one of the season’s biggest upsets. Doyle ran for three touchdowns and intercepted two passes to scramble Hart’s eggs in a 40-21 shocker at College of the Canyons. How sweet it would be to discuss what transpired between hash marks over hash browns.

“Oh, yeah, he had a hundred and one excuses,” an amused Doyle said about Charles, who bravely met him and Saugus defensive back Jibri Hodge for breakfast. “But we didn’t try to rub it in. We tried to show class about it.”

It appears that the entire Saugus football team is moving up in class. Bowman, who left his job as an assistant coach at Huntington Beach Marina High to take the Saugus job last spring, has motivated his legions into playing some of their best football in years. The Centurions won just two games last year; they have that many wins in the past two weeks.

“When he first came here he looked like a jolly old guy and he was real nice,” Doyle said. “We weren’t used to that.”

Doyle said the team grew closer after a summer trip to a passing-league tournament in Visalia. The team stayed in a hotel and Bowman paid for the players to see the Mike Tyson-Razor Ruddock fight on pay-per-view. “All of a sudden we were like a big family,” Doyle said. “He made us have fun again.”

And as the Hart game approached, Doyle said, an eerie sense befell the team in practice: The Centurions actually believed they were going to win.

“The whole week before, no one was really sure what was going to happen,” Doyle said. “But we knew we were capable of winning. And I started thinking, ‘If we win, we’re going to win big.’ ”

The new-found confidence was brimming the night before the game. Doyle and Charles went to a library to study and ran into several Saugus players there.

“Guys started teasing Deriek, saying, ‘What are you going to do tomorrow night when you run trips left?’ You know, teasing him like we knew (their offense),” Doyle said. “Deriek just said, ‘You guys can talk all you want, but we’re gonna rock you, just like we do every year.’ ”

But the rockin’ and rollin’ was to be done by Saugus. Doyle broke a 36-yard run in the first quarter to make the score 16-0, and he ran 11 yards for a touchdown in the second quarter to push the lead to 22 points. Shortly thereafter, Saugus knocked Hart quarterback Ryan Connors out of the game, and the rout was on.

In the third quarter, Doyle intercepted a pass and later scored on a 12-yard run to make the score 39-13. After Bowman put in the second string late in the game, he asked Doyle to return when a safety was injured. Doyle intercepted the next pass.

“David Doyle had a tremendous game on both sides of the ball,” Bowman said. “He made runs that were just really fine.”

So taken was Bowman with Doyle’s effort, he presented Doyle with the game ball at midfield. Bowman then kneeled and kissed Doyle’s hand.

A tribute fit for a king. And why not? For one night, Doyle was master of all he surveyed. Actually, for one night and the following morning.