For senior Dametrius Ingram, it is all about setting himself apart from his peers.
So when football season began earlier this fall, he made some changes. Not in the way you’d expect, though.
The first thing he wanted was a revamped appearance, and he started with his hair.
He kept the right side of his hair black, opting to transform the left side with a mix of red and blonde dye.
“I wanted to do something different with it and stand out,” Ingram said. “I wanted to get noticed, so I decided to do bright red and some blonde. I’ve done this before with different colors.”
Of course, standing out was never a problem for Ingram.
He wasn’t well-known when he joined the MacArthur football team during his junior year. He’d spent some of his 8th-grade year at Mac Middle School but moved to the westside of Lawton and attended Eisenhower when his parents divorced.
He then had a short stint in the Dallas-Fort Worth area before returning to Lawton to live with his father. He didn’t even play football his freshman year, choosing to focus on basketball.
When he decided to come back to the sport last year, though, he said he knew he’d have to impress the Highlander coaches if he wanted some playtime, and that’s exactly what he did.
“I knew coach (Brett) Manning and all of them, but they’d never seen me play,” Ingram said. “Last year, I played a lot of JV to prove myself. So I came out to practice every day and gave it my all.”
Ingram adapted and earned some time on the varsity team at the cornerback position, but after Mac surrendered nearly 30 points per game and finished the season with a 6-5 record, he realized he and the entire returning defensive roster had to make wholesale changes.
His teammates agreed.
“During the offseason, we all agreed we couldn’t be like last year,” Ingram said. “We knew we had to come out with more aggressiveness and be different than last year. We wanted to stand out, so we all committed to ourselves that this year we’d try hard and try our best to be the No. 1 defense in Lawton. That really matters to us.”
The defensive numbers have slightly improved this season, but now Mac faces a different challenge — making the playoffs.
The Highlanders enter Week 10 with a 4-5 record, and the winner of Friday night’s game between Mac and El Reno gets the final playoff spot out of District 5A-1. A loss would mean the Highlanders missing the playoffs for the first time since 2001.
Ingram said he knows it’ll be a difficult task because Mac is missing several key starters to injury, but the team will stop at nothing to make sure it is not on the wrong side of program history.
“We gotta come out and give it our all like it’s the last game,” Ingram said. “We are missing a lot of big players, and it’s just who is going to play for who right now. We just gotta go out there and give it our all.
“We talked about it earlier this (Monday) morning. We don’t want to be the first team to not make the playoffs, so we have to take this game real serious.”