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As the drizzling rain splashes on their foreheads, the members of the Henry A. Wise High School football team are huddled tightly around their coach, listening intently to a halftime speech delivered with a drill instructor's cadence.

"When you get back out there I want perfection," says DaLawn Parrish, the 32-year-old, steely-eyed former defensive back. "Do you understand?"

The reply is immediate and uniform: "Yes, sir."

For this group, Parrish's wish isn't wholly unrealistic. The Pumas are 8-0. For seven consecutive games they have not allowed a single point. Saturday's 44-0 win in the rain at Oxon Hill High School tied the Maryland record for consecutive shutouts.

The talk of perfection comes just four years after Wise's first football team, and its young, inexperienced coach lost eight of 10 games.

The architect

Parrish collected at least 50 tackles in each of his four years as a defensive back at Wake Forest. After graduating in 2000, he came home to his alma mater, Howard High in Columbia, and served as an assistant coach for a year before taking a similar position at another Columbia school, Wilde Lake High. In 2004, he got the head coaching job he'd pined for at DuVal High in Lanham.

When practice started in August 2004, there were only 10 players who had the 2.0 grade point average necessary to be eligible for sports. After doing some recruiting within the school, Parrish's teams went 0-9 in 2004 and 2-8 in 2005, but he said the Tigers struggled as a result of his own mistakes.

Coming from a defensive background, Parrish says he concentrated more on one side of the ball than he should have.

"I think my fatal flaw as a young coach was to not be involved in the offense," Parrish said. "We weren't scoring. After that I said I'm calling the offense and if we lose, it's going to be on me."

Parrish says he hoped to find a head coaching job in Howard County, but knew that two wins in two years didn't look good on a resume.

"I was convinced that my career was ruined," he said.

When a coaching vacancy was created with the opening of Henry A. Wise High School in Upper Marlboro, Parrish thought he didn't have a chance at the job.

County Supervisor of Athletics O'Shay Watson, who briefly was the athletic director at Wise before the school opened, said about 15 people applied for the football coaching job at the new school. About 10 were ruled out because they weren't certified teachers in the county, he said.

"I knew of his career at Wake Forest," said Watson, one of several Wise officials who conducted interviews with Parrish and the other applicants. "I was impressed with his resume. And I spoke with other coaches in the county and they all spoke very highly of him."

The junior high school

Two years ago, Wise senior defensive end Rahsaan Moore had to choose a high school. He was transferring from DeMatha High after his freshman year, and he was given the choice of Suitland or Wise.

"I saw a letter from Wise and I was like, ‘Why are they sending me stuff about a junior high school? I'm not going there.'"

Moore said his parents told him that Wise wasn't a junior high, but a new high school in Upper Marlboro. He contacted Parrish, who wanted to meet the DeMatha football transplant.

"I went and talked to Coach P and he looked like he played some ball himself," Moore said. "I was sold."

Moore became a starter on a varsity team hurting for experience. While he was at DeMatha, Wise opened in the fall of 2006 with no seniors in the school. The football team went 2-8. The players came from other high schools, including Surrattsville, Largo, Forestville, Douglass and Charles H. Flowers.

"It was rough," Parrish said. "They were all talking about their past football experiences and I was just trying to get that out of their heads."

In Moore's first year at Wise, the Pumas went 5-5, losing a playoff-clinching final game of the season to Oxon Hill by one point.

"That day we planted the seeds in the players' minds," Parrish said. "We said, ‘Remember this day.' We turned that disgust into a positive."

This time around, Parrish was calling the plays, and instilling a battering rushing attack that relied on attention to detail between the tackles. Last year, senior tailback Anthony Wright emerged as one of the top rushers in the state, leading Wise to a 9-4 finish and the state 4A semifinal, where they lost, 45-8, to Sherwood High.

A year later, and Parrish's Pumas have taken yet another giant leap. They're on the verge of breaking an enviable team record, one that would put the 2009 Wise football team among the elite in state history. While Parrish brushes off the accomplishment, choosing to concentrate on wins and losses instead of state records, the players can't help but look at the big picture.

"We can say that we were the cornerstone of this program," said senior safety Titus Till. "The freshmen and sophomores want to be like us because we're accomplishing things that nobody's done here before."

Parrish says the whole thing seems crazy considering where he was four years ago.

"In the beginning, we had kids that wanted to be at other schools," Parrish said. "Now, every time I talk about ‘Tradition,' ‘Pride,' ‘We are Wise,' they don't look away. They look into my eyes, and they believe it."