Brick by brick, Stortz builds a champion

CHAMPAIGN -- Leave it to a coach to turn an exercise in team-building into, well, an exercise.

When the football players at Lake Zurich were handed bricks this summer and asked to pile them together using a relay system, they started to sweat. They started to huff and puff.

"It was actually pretty tiring," Lake Zurich linebacker Tyler Lafontaine said. "It was like this big workout."

Little did the Bears know that it was so much bigger than that.

That day, as part of coach Bryan Stortz's master plan, they laid the foundation for a profound theme that would take them from the taxing demands of the preseason to the ecstasy of the postseason, which was punctuated on Saturday at Memorial Stadium on the campus of the University of Illinois with the program's first state title.

Thanks to a relentless defense, the 13-1 Bears upset previously undefeated and perennial powerhouse Wheaton Warrenville South 7-3 to earn the Class 7A championship exactly one year after limping out of the same stadium as the runners-up.

"We made a statement by beating Wheaton Warrenville South, the big powerhouse in Illinois," Lake Zurich linebacker Brent Marks said. "We showed that we are a serious program and can beat a team that no one thought we could beat.

"I think the only people in the state of Illinois who knew we could beat those guys were us. And that's because from the start of the preseason we worked so hard and built such a strong foundation."

Quite literally, in fact.

This foundation for success was built one plain ol' cinder block at a time. And the last one was added in Champaign.

Sitting on the Lake Zurich sideline during the game was a cinder block with "R5" written on it. That's short for Round 5 -- as in Round 5 of the playoffs, which is, of course, the state championship game.

For each win this season, the Bears brought out a new cinder block.

"It kind of reminded me of the movie 'Major League,' where every time they won, they ripped something off the poster," Lake Zurich running back Adam Simpson said. "Every step we took, we kept building up."

The Bears placed each newly acquired cinder block around all of the smaller bricks that represent each player, building slowly upward week by week.

And now, the entire structure forms a pyramid, with the top reserved for that very special 'R5' cinder block.

"That really hits home with us, getting to see it all built up," Lake Zurich offensive lineman John Gage said. "We were thinking about it the whole time tonight."

The pyramid -- minus the "R5" block -- was assembled on Monday and positioned in the north end zone of the Bears' stadium as motivation for the state title game. It sat there while the Bears were in Champaign.

The only other time that the pyramid was fully assembled was during the preseason. Back then, the message was that the 'R5' block couldn't be added to the top unless all of the lower blocks were firmly in place.

"At first, we didn't even know what to think about all the bricks and blocks and everything," running back Jon Janus said. "The coaches had us writing things on them, we were doing relay races with them. We were all like, 'Why are we doing this? This is kind of weird.' But when it got put together, it looked pretty sweet and I think that motivated us."

And that was just the point. Everyone says that kids these days are visual learners, and the Lake Zurich coaches wanted a goal system that the kids could touch, feel and see.

"This all started when Jon's dad (Brian Janus) stopped by my house over the summer to see my (newborn) daughter (Avery), and he asked me what the biggest challenge was going to be for the team this season," Stortz said. "I said it was going to be that everyone needed to stop thinking that we were just going to get back downstate (automatically), that we needed to figure out what we needed to do to become a team that could just win the first game of the season and the game after that and the game after that.

"My wife (Jamie) says that we sat around for about four hours talking about that and coming up with this pyramid thing. We just started hammering out ideas and then I went to the coaches the next day and we took the base framework and starting running with it."

Then, a trip to Home Depot was in order. The staff wound up loading up a few trucks with all of their supplies.

"The kids had no idea what was going on until it all came together, but then we had this great theme for our season," Stortz said. "We would often talk about how different people would have to carry the weight throughout the season and how you have to rely on one another. All these great analogies came out of it and I think our kids really latched onto it."