Tuesday, Jun. 24, 2008

Olathe Excellence: Football dominance reaches third decade

Editor’s note: Every Wednesday for the next three weeks, sportswriter Andy Marso will highlight the three high school sports Olathe tends to dominate in Kansas — football, softball and soccer. He’ll examine Olathe’s rise to prominence in each sport, the youth programs that feed the city’s success and the possible future standouts who may take the field for the high school teams in the coming years.

Olathe East coach Jeff Meyers thinks he can pinpoint the exact year when Olathe became a high school football power.

“I’d trace it back to my senior year (at Olathe High School), when we were the first undefeated team (in the regular season) in a long time,” Meyers said. “We were 9-0 in 1976 and very highly regarded and from that point on, the Olathe dynasty kind of began.”

That team was coached by Bud Wheeler, who is generally credited with laying the city’s football foundation. Wheeler, who died in March at age 74, coached Olathe North and Olathe South from 1973 to 1995 and handed down a strong work ethic and passion for the game of football that continues to this day.

One of Wheeler’s proteges, Gene Wier, carried on those traditions and led North to seven state championships between 1996 and 2003. That run put Olathe among the state’s other dynasties like the Lawrence teams of the late 1980s and early 1990s, while NFL alums like South’s Don Davis and North’s Darren Sproles have raised Olathe’s national profile and helped make prep football a source of civic pride.

“Kids here, growing up they have that expectation that when they get to high school they’re going to be a part of something that’s pretty special,” current North coach Pete Flood said. “They look forward to it.”

While Olathe’s football past is impressive, one could argue that the depth of talent in the city was as good this year as it has ever been.

Olathe’s four high schools — East, South, North and Northwest, combined for a 31-14 overall record, including a 24-7 mark when they weren’t playing each other.

Olathe dominated the eastern side of the state, with East, South and North each taking one of the final four playoff spots in that half of the bracket. Though South fell in the state title game to Hutchinson, the current talent base along with a thriving youth football scene suggests Olathe will be back.

The roots of the tree

The current culture of outstanding prep football in Olathe owes much of its success to the city’s junior high schools.

Olathe is different than many school districts in that its junior high system includes ninth graders, while other districts lump them with the rest of the high schoolers. Meyers said that gave Olathe an edge, because it gave more ninth-graders an opportunity to play for their respective junior highs, rather than being just a number as one of hundreds of freshmen at a single high school.

“So many ninth-graders are able to play football and then feed into our high schools,” Meyers said. “When I’ve got three schools feeding my school I’ve got that many more players that have started and have experience coming into their sophomore years.”

Plus, Meyers knows his players will get solid coaching in the junior high ranks.

For decades Olathe’s junior highs have been a hotbed of coaching development as much as player development. Meyers and Flood both started out as junior high coaches and even the now-legendary Wier cut his teeth at that level before he was hand-picked for Wheeler’s staff at Olathe High.

Matt Sorrels is among the current crop of leaders preparing the city’s future high school players. He coaches the ninth-grade team at Chisholm Trail Junior High.

“We definitely follow those kids as they go up,” Sorrels said. “It’s fun to watch them on Friday nights and see how they improve, get bigger and stronger and take those fundamentals we teach them to the next level.”

Sorrels, with seven years of coaching under his belt, is a neophyte compared to Melvin Foxx, who has been a head coach at Oregon Trail for 21 years.

For decades Foxx has been one of the many local coaches who give up their afternoons and evenings for very little pay. They make sure that the local players are ready to contribute as soon as they enter the high schools.

“I want them to have an understanding of the basic fundamentals of the game,” Foxx said. “Blocking, tackling, that sort of thing. I’ve been doing it long enough to where I think we do it right. I feel like once they leave me, they have that understanding and know what hard work is.”

For some Olathe youths, junior high is the first taste of competitive football. But many start even earlier, playing for city teams in the Football and Cheerleading Club of Johnson County.

The next generation

Tom Carroll sees some of Olathe’s future high school football stars before they’re even tall enough to ride a rollercoaster.

Take North running back James Franklin, for example, who burst onto the scene this year with a sophomore season that included a 200-plus yard game against Sunflower League champion Shawnee Mission Northwest.

“I had Franklin, I think, fifth grade through seventh,” Carroll said. “He was good and he’s gotten a lot better. On that particular team there was a lot of good kids, especially linemen.”

Carroll is the area director for Olathe North in the football and cheerleading club, while Chris Wilson (East), Trent Thomas (Northwest) and Scott Ryan (South) are his Olathe counterparts.

Ryan currently serves as the chairman of the entire club while Carroll is one of the cornerstones of the organizations. He’s been involved in the club since 1985 and has seen Olathe’s love of football grow exponentially.

“Olathe used to just have a couple teams in the football and cheerleading club,” Carroll said. “It used to just be called the Olathe Broncos. Now we’ve gone to the different high schools and split it up according to that. ... We’re pretty successful in it. We have good coaches, dedicated coaches.”

All the coaches are unpaid volunteers, too, which makes Olathe’s continued growth even more remarkable. After starting with just a few teams in the entire city, now each high school has about 10 youth teams in second through eighth grade.

Many are very successful and feed into the thriving high school programs. Olathe South’s future looks particularly bright, with youth teams at nearly every grade level being invited to the 2007 Mid-States Tournament of Champions — a November event that brought together some of the top squads from Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Carroll said he has a few up-and-comers on the seventh grade team he coaches who may someday carry on the tradition of great running backs at North that includes Sproles and Franklin. Although they’re young and anything can happen in the next three or four years, Carroll said that right now Andre Greer and Trayvonn Headley show a world of promise.

More to come

The value that youth football has to Olathe’s high schools is impossible to quantify.

Some might question how much a kid can develop his football skills before he even reaches puberty, but Carroll notes that just having a knowledge of the game has to benefit Olathe’s youth players.

It’s also worth noting that many of the seniors on South’s state runner-up squad this year had played together for nearly a decade and had developed great chemistry and trust in each other during that time. History would suggest that Olathe’s burgeoning youth football programs will lead to more success at the high school level in the future.

So the beat goes on for Olathe football, with North and East looking particularly primed for another great season in 2008, South’s youth program thriving and Northwest continuing to improve as the school’s enrollment grows.

A change to 9th through 12th-grade high schools is on the horizon, along with the probability of a fifth high school causing enrollment splits again. But, as long as the passion for football and the work ethic Wheeler established in Olathe remains, the more things change, the more they will stay the same.

“I think football’s a big deal here,” Flood said. “I think Olathe supports it and they have ever since I was a kid growing up watching Olathe High play.”

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