Four years after Nick Elizalde’s death, I’m rooting for Roxborough football

School is back in session, and a fresh high school football season is underway, so foot traffic has picked up on the sidewalk on Pechin Street that separates the locker room at Roxborough High School from its dusty, weathered, 87-year-old football stadium.

At least twice a day, down a short hill along that stretch of sidewalk to practice or a game and back up, players and coaches pass a well-tended bronze memorial for Nick Elizalde, the 14-year-old freshman who had only started playing football at Roxborough four years ago.

“Quiet kid, wasn’t very outspoken. But he was starting to open up and become more social,” Marc Skinner, the 47-year-old head football coach at Roxborough, told me before practice last week. “Then we ran into that tragedy.”

Yes. That tragedy. The memorial is roughly at the spot where Nick was gunned down when five shooters fired more than 60 bullets toward a group of football players following an afternoon scrimmage on Sept. 27, 2022. Skinner, then an assistant coach, was there.

But none of the 35 or so members of the current Roxborough football team were there because they all were in junior high school. Two captains, senior defensive end Zaid McDonald and senior quarterback Javon Jones, said they certainly know about Nick even though they never got a chance to meet him.

There is a new mural with a large “62” — Nick’s jersey number — at the back of the school, and a new scoreboard at the field celebrating Nick. Skinner said he was planning to put No. 62 stickers on the players’ navy-blue helmets before Friday’s season opener.

But make no mistake: The Roxborough Wolves are excited about their chances this season. Last year’s team won four of its 11 games, and the first winning season in seven years feels within reach. As Jones said of the 2025 season, “I feel like we got better as the season went on.”

McDonald would add, smiling, “Playing for Roxborough — oh, you really got to work, because not everyone is on the same level.”

Of 571 high school football teams in Pennsylvania, Roxborough ranked 514th entering the season, according to the MaxPreps ratings website. But the Wolves, like the 570 other teams, will start each game this fall with a 0-0 score and a fighting chance.

And I, for one, hope to be at as many Roxborough games as I can. I live a 20-minute walk from the stadium, and as someone who both played and then wrote about high school football way back in the day, the competition is as spirited and ferocious here as anywhere. Really.

It is just that the backdrop is a little different. Games tend to be played Friday after school. Admission is free. Seats in the 2,100-seat grandstand, with a fence still separating Roxborough fans from visiting fans, are easy to find, because 100 people, tops, might show up. There is a dance team on occasion, but there are no lights, no refreshment stand, no press box, no programs, and no marching bands. The patchy grass gridiron is lined only every 10 yards.

How some things have changed. The Academies at Roxborough High School, the full name of the stately, 102-year-old institution on Ridge Avenue in Northwest Philadelphia, has an enrollment of only about 600 students, less than one-third the school’s size in 1972.

The stadium, built for $300,000 by the Works Project Administration, opened on Oct. 7, 1939, for a 14-0 Roxborough victory over Olney. About 3,000 showed up, The Inquirer reported. It was Roxborough’s first game in the Philadelphia Public League.

The very next year, a full-out riot broke out after players from Roxborough tangled with players from Simon Gratz during a 33-0 Roxborough victory, with many fans joining in. Three Philly cops were needed to help the two flustered head coaches break up the melee.

Roxborough won Public League titles in 1957 and 1963, but it had become an also-ran in recent years. A Thanksgiving Day game against Roman Catholic ended in 2018 because Roxborough had not won since 1991, and lost each of the last 14 games by three touchdowns.

Skinner, who became the head coach in 2023, said turnout for football slipped during the pandemic and after the shooting, with a few potential opponents telling him they’d rather not play at Roxborough. The besieged 2022 team won its only game 11 days before the shooting.

“We have kids from different walks of life, and we’re bringing them together to do something they thought they could never do,” Skinner said.

A year after the shooting, the school changed its nickname from Indians to Wolves. The wolf was Nick Elizalde’s “spirit animal”: For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack, reads an inscription under his name on the new scoreboard.

Kristin Williams Smalley, the principal at Roxborough, told me two years ago that the school had been considering a new nickname, and she said: “The mascot was not necessarily named to honor him. It just happened that all of the stars aligned, and the wolf was selected.”

But the name change helped to reset, or refocus, the football program, Skinner said. Because of suspensions and academic ineligibility, Roxborough had only 17 players for a game last year against Olney. But the Wolves stuck together, played hard, and lost by only 22-7.

“Upon further reflection, the wolf is the perfect mascot to represent the Academies at Roxborough High School,” Williams Smalley said. “Wolves are complex, highly intelligent animals who are caring, playful, and above all devoted to family. That is who we are!”

The best high school football players don’t have to stay close to home anymore. The best scholastic player in Pennsylvania last year was Joey O’Brien, a wide receiver and safety from La Salle College High School, the state Class 6A champs. O’Brien, now a freshman at Notre Dame, played for the Roxborough Eagles youth program. Skinner never met him.

He and his small staff will do the best with who shows up. These Wolves have worked hard, and together, during the offseason, he said, but there are still a few students each year who only decide to join the football team after school starts. Skinner brings them on. Nick was a student at Saul High School, but because it doesn’t have any athletic teams, he played for Roxborough.

The players on this team were too young to be around, but the coaches and many former players did know him, and could recall that awful afternoon in 2022. It needs to be remembered, but as Skinner says, “We just try not to dwell on it.”

So, click-clacking on their cleats, the players trudge up and down that hill on Pechin Street, past the site of the shooting. Four other teenagers were wounded on that awful day, and six people were arrested in connection with the shooting. The memorial to Nick serves as a reminder that the impact of gun violence is not so far away.

“We’re trying to keep our eyes open in the hope that our children are not involved in anything bad,” said Skinner, who is a member of the “climate staff” that keeps order at the school.

Students come from all over the city: Zaid McDonald is from Germantown, and Javon Jones is from North Philadelphia. Each would love to go on to play college football, but the opportunity would come at a small school if it did, and Jones said he would go to trade school if it did not.

But football is there for at least the next three months. A winning season and the playoffs are possible, just as they are for any of the state’s other 570 teams. And that is all any high schooler can ask for. Go see for yourself some Friday afternoon. Watch kids play football with joy.

Dave Caldwell lives in Manayunk and covered sports for The Inquirer from 1986 to 1995.