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Thursday, November 6, 2008
Bygone Glory Days
Central Kansas, KS
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By: Jeffrey Lutz, VYPE Central Kansas
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Photo(s) By: Walter Dixon
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When will the drought end? A Wichita public high school football team has not won a state title since 1983
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“Being a City League champion in those days, you knew you had beaten three or four teams in the league that were state-caliber football teams,” says Chuck Porter, the last state champion coach at a Wichita public high school."
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Whenever the last undefeated team in the National Football League loses its first game of the season, members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, which finished 17-0, toast glasses of champagne to celebrate their achievement lasting another year.
Jay Agnew isn’t as stuck in the past as Csonka, Griese and Shula. As a member of the 1983 East High Aces, the City League’s last public school football team to win a state title, Agnew wouldn’t mind if the 25-year drought ended this November. That’s not to say he isn’t aware of the ’83 Aces singular status in Wichita over the past three decades.
“Kirk Allen, he works for the [Wichita school] district now and we always run into each other,” Agnew says of one of his former teammates, an all-state selection at linebacker in 1983. “We kind of have – not a toast – but we always say, ‘We’re still on top.’”
Allen, running back Wes Anderson and coach Chuck Porter were the headliners of the 1983 team, which repeated as Class 6A champions with a league title and 11-1 record. The Blue Aces were stocked with talent, putting seven players on the all-city team along with Porter as coach.
They were the City League’s best, during a time when that meant something throughout the state. From the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, the Greater Wichita Athletic League was pre-eminent.
Kapaun Mount Carmel, under coach Ed Kriwiel, was the standard bearer, winning nine state titles through the 1987 season. Southeast won three state championships in a row from 1976-78, and under Porter, East put itself squarely on the map during the 1980s. Porter came to East High after a successful four-year run at Bishop Carroll, where he won a 5A title in 1978. Porter solidified his legacy with a 40-7 record at East, leading the Aces to the playoffs in each of his four seasons in addition to two 6A state titles.
“A state title is always the ultimate,” declares Porter, now retired after finishing out his career at Buhler High in the 1990s. “But winning the league and being a City League champion in those days, you knew you had beaten three or four teams in the league that were state-caliber football teams.
“The rivalries were awesome when I coached in the City League.”
The glory days are now bygone. Even if you factor in parochial schools Kapaun and Carroll, the league has gone 21 years since its last state title. As the November bond issue vote for USD 259 pended last month, supporters were concerned that Wichita’s public athletic programs would reach new depths without improvements. The district’s dilapidated facilities parallel its football futility, each representing another era.
The league still has more than serviceable teams; however, the separation between the top tier and the rest is wide. Carroll, coming off last season’s first state title game appearance since 1978, is thriving, and Heights suffered a rare absence from the playoffs in 2007. Northwest, a perennial state contender in the 1990s, went 10-1 in 2005. But other teams have failed to sustain runs after brief success. For others, it’s difficult to forecast how the losing will end.
“I don’t think right now we’re recognized as one of the top teams because we haven’t produced a state championship,” says City League coaching veteran Gary Guzman, in his fourth season at Southeast after coaching at Kapaun for 14 years. “I think people go by what you’ve done. They’re going to look at if you’ve won a state championship or if you’ve advanced deep into the playoffs. Really, we haven’t done either one.”
Even appearances in the state title game have been rare. Since East’s back-to-back titles, only two public teams have made it – Northwest in 1996 and West in 1997. Both teams lost to Olathe North in the midst of its dynastic run under Gene Weir. After Olathe North, Hutchinson took the mantle. Consecutive state titles has been a trend rather than a rare occurrence in 6A football. Heights coach Rick Wheeler says such runs of consecutive titles may not be a coincidence. Teams which advance deep in the playoffs get several extra weeks of practice, says Wheeler, and they return the next year more seasoned and learned, ready for another charge to the postseason.
“You can look in every class where a team gets on a roll and gets into the state championship game and then is there for several years in a row,” says Wheeler. “Hutch is evidence of that. Before Hutch it was Olathe North and before that it was Lawrence.”
State title programs start rolling long before their first run through the playoffs, however. The benefit Hutchinson receives from its grade school and middle school football programs is well-documented. The Wichita school district doesn’t offer middle school football. Future city players come up through the Wichita youth football ranks, but the middle school teams do not feed particular high school programs. Knowledge of how the high school coach expects the game to be played does not accumulate and chemistry among teammates does not develop.
Kids in Wichita move to a different district and school if a better opportunity presents itself. It happens often enough that it has become a common complaint among the City League’s coaches.
“One of the things that I’ve seen that hurts every team in the city is that kids move around all the time,” Guzman says. “That’s the biggest factor, because you don’t know if you’re going to have those kids that started with your program as freshmen. They may leave that same year, they may leave when they’re juniors if they’re not happy about the situation and they’ll just walk away from it. If that continues, I don’t know if we’ll ever [win a state title].”
Parents are free, of course, to move their kids to the youth program and ultimately the high school at which they will get best opportunity to play at a high level. A kid who lives in North High’s district may end up at Heights; a kid in West’s district may end up at Southeast. It’s a problem that each of the seven public school City League coaches endures, and a solution may be non-existent. If you’re not in the mix for the city’s top players, it’s going to be hard to win.
“The main thing that hurts is pride in your school,” Schartz says. “Kids (in Great Bend) know they’re going to be a Great Bend Panther. (In Goddard) they know they’re going to be a Goddard Lion. They don’t know they’re going to be a Northwest Grizzly. They could move tomorrow. You just don’t know who you’re going to get.”
The speedy improvement of athletic programs at suburban schools in Goddard, Maize and Andover certainly hasn’t helped high school sports in Wichita. Though the top-level football talent in those programs may not be on par with Wichita’s, programs in those towns are more tightly coordinated. By the time they enroll in high school, learning a coach’s style takes virtually no time.
The culture of academic performance is another obstacle city schools face. Wichita public high schools use weekly grade check-ups to determine a player’s status for that week’s football game, and a coach can be left scrambling to fill his spot just a few days before a game.
“Kids from other schools, they have that structure,” says East coach Brian Byers. “They have the family, the mom and dad telling them what to do and where to be, and they grow up with that and they’re a little more disciplined.
“We have to deal with a lot of things that our kids face that they don’t face. If we dealt with the same things that those kids dealt with, the City League would be a powerhouse. We have more talent than those schools, but we need to get it channeled in the right direction.”
With the latest 6A dynasty ending its run last fall (Hutch moved down to 5A), a new champion will arise this November. Among Wichita’s seven public school teams, Heights has the best chance to renew the league’s strength. It could be argued that a 6A state title for Heights this fall would have as positive and strong an impact on USD 259 athletics as an approved bond issue.
The Falcons entered district play undefeated and have what is probably the league’s most balanced team. Heights is more than capable on offense, with running back Richard Dixon and quarterback Chris Boyd leading a versatile attack. But if the Falcons are to advance deep into the postseason, it will probably be on the back of the defense, a group of ball-hawks which force turnovers on the line and in the secondary.
Heights has had its share of close calls, reaching the playoffs three times this decade and losing to the eventual state champion each time.
With wins over the league’s two other perennial contenders this fall, Carroll and Northwest, and a district showdown with Derby awaiting them at the end of October, the Falcons were poised to challenge for the 6A crown.
“I think so far, so good,” Wheeler said before district play. “We’re in a situation with kids that have some experience. We have kids back that have varsity playing experience, and that’s setting us up well for the start we’ve had. I think we can compete with anybody in the state, but that’s why they play the games.”
If Heights removes the monkey from the City League’s back, other coaches in the league will celebrate – sort of. Even Schartz – though he won’t be as happy as he would have been if his team would have scored two more points against Olathe North in 1997.
“I would say ‘Great, but I want to win it,’” says Schartz, who came up just short against Weir and Olathe North as coach at West High. “I’m being honest. I want to be the coach that does it. But if Heights would do it, I would be happy for them.”
Twenty-five years is a quarter-century; East High’s accomplishment in 1982 and 1983 is magnified by each passing year. The Aces won 11 games in each of those seasons during the tail end of an era in which Wichita was a high school football hotbed. Even with the standout players the league still annually boasts, they may not compare to the 1970s and 1980s, when rivalry match-ups in the league were community events and every contest on the schedule presented a potential stumbling block.
"I remember us dominating people, but I look back at the scores and we didn’t,” says Schartz, a player for the great Southeast teams in the late 1970s. Not compared to the overwhelming scores teams put up in today’s City League. “We beat people 28-7, 35-7, 35-14. We didn’t beat anybody by 50 or 60 points or even 40. Now you have the haves – your top four schools – and the bottom five are just pathetic. I think that hurts us because you’re not getting good games every week. Back then you had a good game six out of the nine weeks.”
Nothing came easy for East High in ’82 and ’83. The Aces’ biggest player on the offensive line in 1982 weighed 170 pounds. They were a little bigger in 1983, but still relied on speed, technique and heart. Anderson led the league in rushing in 1983 with 1,208 yards, running behind skilled offensive lineman Kelly Smith. The defensive line was just as solid but no bigger, anchored by Bernard Jones and Kenny Woods and backed by Allen and Erik Purins.
Porter, who holds legendary status in the league with three state titles despite only coaching in it for eight seasons, knew his team was capable of the repeat after a first-round playoff victory over Manhattan, which had entered undefeated.
“We had beaten them in the playoffs in ’82 at Carpenter Stadium, and they came back in ‘83, and they were loaded,” Porter remembers. “We beat them 14-7 on the KSU turf in the first round of the playoffs. That might have been a key moment right there.”
East became more confident after winning in 1982, avenging a title-game loss the previous year by what Porter calls his most talented East team. Instead of worrying about the target their 1982 state title had made them, the Aces reveled in it. Their only loss that season came to Springdale, Ark., in the season’s second game. East responded with a 10-game season-ending winning streak.
“Our pitch to them all year long was, ‘We are state champions until somebody beats us,’” says Porter. “The state championship is yours. That’s sort of the way we looked at things, and we just sort of went about our business.”
Even Porter, now living in Buhler, admits that the 25-year wait for a 6A City League champion has been too long. Though he says he rarely follows high school football anymore, he welcomes the next member to the City League state champion club, whenever it may happen.
The coaches in the City League seem to welcome the challenges their schools face and recognize that winning a state title in spite of them could be more meaningful than winning one without them.
“I think we’ve had some awfully good, quality teams during that time [since East won in 1983]. Winning a state championship is everybody’s goal, especially the teams that are vying for a league championship every year.”
What was once the state’s best league for high school football is losing credibility each year. But one state championship could quickly reverse that trend and maybe even infuse a district with new belief.
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