Antioch's moms dish it out; the football team eats it up

And here I thought serving up Thanksgiving dinner for 12 was a challenge.

There's the planning, and the shopping, and the baking and the cooking and the timing it all out so that everything's ready and warm at the same time.

It's enough to make you want to give thanks - for caterers.

Then I heard about the football moms at Antioch.

They probably could be caterers if they wanted to.

Their food is certainly tasty enough. And they make a 12-person dinner look like child's play.

Sure, they've got strength in numbers, sometimes as many as 20 to 25 cooks in their kitchen. But, each fall, they're also cooking for about 10 times as many people as I sometimes cook for at Thanksgiving.

And, here's the thing: They do it week after week after week.

In fact, moms at Antioch have been feeding football players for 31 years now - and this season was their busiest yet.

With the Sequoits advancing all the way to last week's Class 6A state semifinals, where they fell to Lemont for their very first loss of the season, the moms put on weekly pregame meals for more than 100 players for a total of 13 weeks.

And that was just the half of it.

When Antioch ran its record to 7-0 in mid-October, the moms added a second meal into the mix.

"We kicked it up a notch," said Fran Ano, whose son Mark is a senior and was a starting offensive lineman for the Sequoits. "We started serving them the night before games, too. That's a lot of food."

Yep, 50 pounds of pasta, 30 pounds of sauce, 30 loaves of bread and 10 pounds of salad each weekend is definitely a lot.

A lot of food, and a lot of dough - of the green variety.

I mean, I thought my grocery bill for Thanksgiving dinner was enormous.

Luckily for the football moms, they just had to worry about the cooking. The financial side of their meals was totally covered.

Thanks to donations from dozens of businesses throughout the community, plus a small fee that each player contributes at the beginning of the season, the football moms had about $450 to spend on food each week.

"And I pretty much used it all, too," laughed Carolyn Schartz, whose son Bobby is a senior and played on the defensive line. She is the football mom's chief grocery shopper.

"Sometimes I get some looks (at the grocery store) because I'm getting so much," Schartz said. "But these guys eat a lot. I'm doing a lot of bulk shopping, a lot of loading up."

Then it was back to the high school, where an army of moms was standing by in the school cafeteria ready to fire up the industrial-sized stoves in the kitchen.

Cooking time usually ran between two to three hours.

For most meals this season, the moms served some kind of pasta (baked mostaccioli was a favorite), along with fresh salads, homemade garlic bread, fruit and homemade desserts.

"All the players love all the food. My favorite is the mostaccioli," Bobby Schartz said. "I think the guys are pretty appreciative. You can see it's a lot of work. When my mom's not working on her job, she's working on football stuff."

Not that the moms seem to mind.

The pregame meals were not only a labor of love on behalf of their sons - and all of their "adopted sons," they were also an excuse for all the moms to hang out with some of their closest friends.

"This is just a lot of fun," Fran Ano said. 'You make such good friends with the other families. I mean, sometimes, we all get together for dinner outside of this.

"We were friends before, but now we're like attached at the hip. I just can't imagine Antioch football without the football moms."