This fall season, the Westford Academy Grey Ghosts put together a performance that has not been seen in years. With their 9-2 record and Dual County League win, the football team has set the bar high for future seasons.

At the beginning of the season, the football team won nine consecutive games, including against Chelmsford, which the team has never beaten prior to this year. Throughout the season, they won games against difficult opponents such as Lincoln-Sudbury. According to senior co-captain Ben Cassidy, LS had a chance to win towards the end, but WA surpassed them in the final moments of the game.

“We had a comeback and won that game in the last couple minutes,” said Diamond. “That game was tough.”

In the DCL game clincher against Cambridge, the team won 45-34. At halftime, the score was 38-8 with Westford in the lead, so the team made the decision to take off their starting players and allow players without as much experience onto the field.

“We pulled most of our starters and put on JV kids to give them more experience,” said Barnas. “We came out and got an early lead. We did our job early.”

They made it to the playoffs as the second seed in the north division and won their first game against North Andover. However, because the playoffs is single elimination, the team was forced out after losing to Reading. In the game, they were leading 3-0 until there were six minutes left in the fourth quarter.

“That was an offensive struggle,” said Cassidy. “Defense played very well.”

“They just kind of wore us down and pulled ahead,” added junior co-captain Connor Degenhardt.

With the high ratio of wins to losses, Head Coach Adam Gagne attributed the team’s overall success to the experience of returning players.

“The foundation of this team and their success stems from the strong senior leadership. I am very proud of each and member of this Championship team,” said Gagne.

Diamond added, “It was more fine-tuning instead of figuring it out like last year. As we got into those final games like towards the DCL championship […] we had so much momentum and we were so close.”

This is a far cry from last year when the football season started off slow with many consecutive losses, but as the season progressed, the team pulled their total game score up to five wins to six losses.

According to Cassidy, last year, the team was not as cohesive as it was during this season.

“Most of our skilled positions on offense were juniors and sophomores. We weren’t experienced and couldn’t get it done on offense. Defense seemed like they were playing the whole game. They got tired and they couldn’t really do it,” said Cassidy.

However, this season, though the team had many experienced players, many younger students without varsity experience had the opportunity to participate and proved their worth, as shown in the game against Cambridge.

“We also had to have a lot of younger kids that really had no varsity experience [step] up to play well,” said Barnas.

The team’s close dynamic also helped the team to be successful, along with their ability to stay on task and work towards winning games.

“I could go up to anyone on the team and joke around, and even with the coaches […] We could be serious but also know when to have fun. The coaches did a good job of making things fun for us,” said Diamond.

Degenhardt added, “It was a lot of fun, but at the same time we knew we had to show up and do our work. When we showed up, we were getting stuff done.”

In addition to their focused practice and positive team dynamic, the team was able to utilize technology such as the new drone to assist in practice.

“There’s nowhere to hide on the practice field [with the drone]. The coaches can see everything, so you can’t take any plays off or do the wrong thing because you’re going to get yelled at about it,” said Degenhardt.

Though the team will be losing many of their experienced players and four out of the five captains after graduation, for next year, the current captains believe the team will be able to continue to succeed.

“I think we have some good players coming back, but we still have to work hard in the off-season. We’re losing a lot of key guys, and we’re losing a lot of leadership especially. We have to have some guys step up who maybe didn’t play this year. They’re going to have to play a larger role and keep improving all around,” said Degenhardt.