On Nov. 2, the Scots entered the fourth quarter of the season’s senior night game down 37-14 to visiting Hamline University.
The Scots didn’t stop fighting. They haven’t all season.
For Head Coach Phil Nicolaides, that fight is what’s important: “Even after heartbreaking loss after heartbreaking loss, season ending injury after season ending injury, all this stuff that continued to pile up against us, we just kept getting stronger from it.”
With 12 minutes in the game, running back Vasco Sierra ’26 completed a five-yard run for a touchdown to cut the Piper lead to 37-21.
“A lot of teams would’ve folded,” Daniel Powell ’27 explained. “Last year’s team would have folded. I think the year before that, they would have folded. But not these guys.”
Thriving under pressure is key to this team. They call it anti-fragility.
“Football has shown me how to go through hard times and unite against difficult times,” defensive lineman Xavier Pittman ’25 explained as he reflected on his four years on the team.
Captain Max Menache ’25 looks back on what he’s learned similarly: “hard things are worth doing.”
Minutes later, quarterback Jude Wallin ’26 connected on a 39-yard touchdown pass to Henry Clymer ’25 to cut the gap down to 8 points, 37-29, after the two point convergion.
The team hasn’t had an easy four years. The current seniors were recruited by Tony Jennison, and had anticipated him being their coach.
Justin Potts ’25 found out Jennison was stepping down on what he thought would be a normal preseason Zoom call ahead of the 2021 campaign. “It was a call that the coach that did recruit me … was stepping down, so it was just like ‘okay what’s this about?’ One of the other coaches that I really liked stepped up to the head coach role. And then people didn’t like him, and so he left as well. So I was just really hoping we find a good guy.”
Offensive Coordinator KiJuan Ware stepped up as interim head coach for the 2021 season until Nicolaides was hired.
“It’s been bumpy for sure,” Menache said. “That’s just what happens when there’s turnover. It’s not smooth to start. And yeah, so we got to work together to figure it out and I think that’s what we’re doing.”
Even though he didn’t recruit them, Nicolaides believes that he was meant to coach these players. “No one comes into your life by accident. This specific group I met in April of their freshman year, [2022]. And so the last three years, we’ve really grown together. And I don’t know if it’s fate. I don’t know what it is. But they definitely didn’t come into my life by accident.”
Players reflect the same message. “But everything happens for a reason,” Menache said. “And I love playing for Coach Nic.”
Nicolaides met the current seniors when they were first-years, and started coaching them as sophomores. Now, he gets to see them step up as leaders of the team.
“We have some guys who are extremely vocal. We have some guys that say very little. But they’re all leaders in the way they carry themselves, the way they work, the way they prepare,” Nicolaides said.
Potts leads by example, “I’m not a ‘rah rah,’ like speech guy and when I tried, it kind of went poorly … But people see me working hard in the classroom, and they see me working hard on the field, and I can make plays when it’s time. And I feel like people can get behind that.”
Menache tries to focus on leading with positivity, “I just try to keep the energy up and the attitude up, you know, make sure our heads are high. You know, it has been a tough season, but like, we gotta keep going.”
He wants to be someone younger members of the team can talk to and look to for support.
It was a senior on the team who got Pittman to commit to Macalester. “When I visited here, way back when I was a freshman, one of the teammates gave me a book, ‘The Alchemist,’ by Paulo Coelho. That was one of those moments where I was like ‘I have to go here,’ and it keeps being proven time and time that people are very supportive of each other’s dreams. I’m an artist and at my high school, there wasn’t as much support for nerdy stuff but at Macalester, there is that kind of support.”
Pittman has seen some culture shifts in more recent years on the team: “I feel like before there were a lot more athletes that could probably mix in with the general student body really well. But now there is more of a difference, I think people are more set apart, which is not like a good thing or a bad thing, because on one side, we’re heading towards a more competitive way of playing on the team. On the other hand, it’s sometimes hard to relate to the other team members.”
Still, Pittman is hopeful for the team, especially when looking at the current first-years, the second full class Nicolaides has recruited.
Nicolaides is specific about who he recruits. He aims to recruit good people — and he’s willing to choose a player with more character over one with more skill on the field.
“Character has to trump anything,” he explained. “We can take a football player who might need a lot of work on the field and we can correct his technique and we can try to develop him as a football player. If there’s not that willingness to grow and that willingness to be a great teammate and if you’re kind of an ego guy or a me guy or a selfish guy, I just don’t think this is the place for you.”
He also thinks that it takes a certain character for guys to choose to play at Mac.
“I think a large part of why a young man would choose to come to Macalester and play football for our team is because they want to be challenged and they don’t want anything handed to them,” Nicolaides said.
One drive remained for the Scots to score a touchdown to give them a shot at tying the game. 13 plays and a three yard run by Sierra to cap it off got them there. It left the Scots down only two points. 31 seconds were left on the clock.
This is the spot Nicolaides recruits for: the long shot. The challenge.
The team’s resilience is rooted in who they’re fighting for: each other.
The team’s motto, “One Blood,” is emblematic of that. Pittman explains it as: “We keep holding each other throughout [everything]. We don’t fall apart, we don’t fight each other. We fight with each other. We pick each other up when we fall down, we keep moving forward … if one guy is down, we’re all down.”
Football is the main space where many of these players have found community. That sense of belonging is reaffirmed in the game itself.
“I mean, football is just such a great team sport,” Menache said. “There’s no sport like it. When you’re on a team, it’s really like a second family. Something about the culture in it and being there for your teammates. Yeah, it’s very special.”
The team had one shot at a two-point conversion to tie up the game and go into overtime. A shot at breaking the season’s winless record. This wasn’t the last game of the season; they’ll play against Augsburg University — whom the Scots haven’t beaten since 1990 — on Nov. 9 and have one further game on championship week, likely against the College of St. Scholastica.
The season’s losses have been tough.
Nicolaides plans to keep coaching at Macalester for decades. But these guys only get four years. And only one senior year.
He’s struggled with each loss, “You pour your heart into something; and there’s absolutely been times this year where I’m like, ‘Man, this is really hard.’ Like, ‘this is a huge struggle.’ And the reason that I always end up finding it easier to dig deep is because I know that young men on our team and in our program are such great kids and they deserve everything we have as coaches.”
The pass for the two-point conversion was incomplete. The game was another loss.
But when Nicolaides thinks about the team’s 0-8 record, he recalls a question posed in a political ad he saw a few years ago:
“What are you willing to lose over?”
For Nicolaides, it’s this team: “I’ve never been more proud of a group. And so that’s, that’s my reflection. I’m just forever indebted to these guys and I want nothing more than to send them off with a couple wins down the stretch, because I think they deserve it. But you know, 2-8, 0-10, 10-0, 8-2, whatever. Not going to change how I view these guys. I mean, I told them before the first game I loved them and I’m always going to love them. And so I could care less what our record is, when it comes to that.
“This year, in a lot of ways, has sucked. It’s been really hard. It’s been heartbreaking at times. But then also, I think there’s value in having your heart broken … I think [these seniors will] always be a part of the program and I’ll be talking about their unbreakable spirit forever.”
When the players get off the field after a loss like Saturday, what they say to each other is simpler.
As Pittman explained: “We just say ‘I love you.’ We just hug each other and support each other; cry a little bit and say ‘I love you.’”
