Lake Mary (Fla.) focused on the present, not the past

SANFORD, Fla.– If you ask Lake Mary head football coach Scott Perry anything about last year’s Florida Class 7A state championship game against Venice, he’s going to give you a look.

That look is of not wanting to talk about what wasn’t indicative about what kind of team the Rams had last season for the previous 14 contests leading up into that point.

Perry sees that his team ended up playing their worst game at the very end and all he’s focused on his team doing is moving past that point.

“No, no, we all want to forget about that game,” Perry said. “I mean, it was a great experience just being there, but the way we played was not very good, and we’re a much better team than that. We were a better team than that last year. If we were to have played like that in the first four games of the playoffs, we wouldn’t have been (at the state championship), and we played terrible. But that happens, and, you know, we’re not bringing that up. We’re bringing up the fact that, hey, we have a high expectation here. The bar is set pretty high.”

The ceiling remains high for the Rams despite of the numerous graduations of many key starters because of the group Perry has coming back, led by 4-star 2026 quarterback Noah Grubbs, who returns for his senior season.

Grubbs, a Notre Dame commitment, led Lake Mary to the 7A state title game berth in 2024 and finished the season completing 205 of 355 passes for 3,024 yards and 37 touchdowns. The senior will have to put up more gaudy numbers with basically a completely revamped receiving corps this fall.

Leading the new group of pass catchers is Florida International commit Barrett Schulz, who transferred in from Orange City University and tallied 40 catches for 691 yards, 10 touchdowns in ’24. Schulz comes over not having set individual expectations, all in the spirit of wanting to achieve one overall team goal every week of winning.

“I’ve never been much of like a set goal type of guy,” Schulz said. “I just always want to win. It don’t matter (stats wise). It doesn’t matter if I have one catch, zero catches is nothing, as long as we win.”

The offensive side of the ball is being re-tooled, but flipping over to defense, the Rams will have a lot of new faces starting from defensive line to the secondary.

One returner to the defensive line is 2026 defensive lineman Richie Crouse III, who notched 14 tackles last season. Crouse is one of the few players who saw any kind of playing time on a defensive unit that was very senior-laden.

What can be looked at as another positive when it comes to players for Lake Mary is the number of them coming to play for Perry. During spring practices, Perry said around 200 kids came out to the team, showing signs of rising interest in playing for the Rams coming off a state championship run.

Perry said the team currently has around 65 on varsity with the remaining 135 divvied up between the junior varsity and freshman teams. When it comes to Lake Mary, there’s no question that players want to be apart of the school’s football team.

“So, we’re fortunate at Lake Mary High School,” Perry said. “We have three levels of football, freshman, JV and varsity. Our freshman team, I guess has about 50 kids. Our JV has like 70 kids. And our varsity, I think, whatever, the rest is, 60, 65 kids. I think 65, actually, on varsity right now.

“And, you know, our varsity squad, we don’t I’m not counting kids that are like two JV and varsity. I’m not counting six quarter guys. I’m talking 65 varsity only players, which is unusual. I mean, when I started, we were lucky to get, you know, 38 dedicated varsity players. You had guys that came up and played both levels, but this is the first time that I’ve said, you know, we’re running out of numbers here when we’ve got 65 kids, that’s a lot.”

Now just less than two weeks away from summer practices getting underway, Lake Mary heads in with seemingly heightened expectations because of it being Grubbs’ senior season.

Perry sees it a little differently. Not because the goal isn’t to get back to the state championship due to it being Grubbs’ final one as a Ram. The veteran coach sees it as reaching a state final has always been the goal in his 21 years of coaching.

2025 is playing out with the same expectations as Perry has always seen it, with no talks of the past, just focusing on the present and beyond.

“We want to get there every year,” Perry added. “I’ve been trying to get there for 21 years now and finally, we got there. 


“So it feels good to have done it. It feels so good we want to do it again. And I don’t think there’s anything because it’s Noah’s senior year that we’re all going, you know, we got, like you said, a sense of urgency to do it. I just think we put the same amount of pressure on us every year to do that and hopefully we can.”