My daughter, Ellen, in early 2021, broke my Chip Shots writer’s block in what turned out to be a fun piece to prepare.
What better way to get ready for Warsaw’s state finals football clash tonight than to have some words with my son, Parker Davenport, who was in the words of Warsaw Tiger head football coach, Bart Curtis, “a (strong side line) backer in a perfect world” who – out of necessity – was moved to the defensive line in his senior season.
He and his teammates earned Warsaw’s first sectional title and still, to this day, have the program’s only win over the Penn Kingsmen.
This morning, for those catching up, the Tigers finally exceeded 80 regular season practices, on the verge of competing for and possibly winning the school’s first state football title.
While, compared to the sectional title achieved in the 2019 season, today’s air in Lucas Oil Stadium – where NFL action is usually the main event – is the most rarified air a high school athlete can breathe, there are thoughts from my son I was eager to share about approaching a big game, and reflecting on how his team’s efforts during Coach Curtis’s second of seven campaigns to date formed the program in its current state.
The 24 seniors taking the field today were sixth graders when Curtis joined the Warsaw program in the first of seven seasons to date in 2018.
One of the first things I noticed with the team calendar during my son’s playing days was the regular season practices were numbered, and the calendar was set with time ranges and other details all the way through the state finals, punctuated by a team banquet date set on a December Sunday.
Curtis didn’t take the reigns to be a caretaker for graduating classes to just cycle through the best athletes with the best intangibles for a nine-game regular season. He moved from Mishawaka, a program rich in tradition whose teams he led to multiple sectional titles and a trip to Lucas Oil Stadium in the Class 4A state finals in 2012.
He stated his intent to take a program whose contributions to the trophy cases had some conference championship hardware, but no postseason trophies.
Parker Davenport reflected on those early days thinking about postseason success. He was a junior in Curtis’s first season.
“Winning sectionals felt like a fever dream in the years when I played,” the younger Davenport remarked. “We lost much more playoff games than we won. We had a big program in terms of numbers, but playoff wins were rare. This lit a fire under our butts right away. The kids coming back after we graduated and won the first-ever sectional title were already talking about conference trophies, too.”
The 2019 sectional title was indeed followed up with a conference title in 2020. The third season under the current leadership did not, however, secure a sectional title, and neither did the following three teams from 2021 through 2023.
Enter this year’s Tigers, who probably lulled area football fans after two straight midseason losses into thinking it would still be a decent season if the Tigers ran the table to a 6-3 regular season and played competitively in the postseason.
This is a different time, though, and the Tigers are – this morning – riding a seven-game win streak into Lucas Oil Stadium.
Some pundits might give credit to landing in IHSAA enrollment class 5A for the fist time since the six-class system was formed in 2013.
“Are you kidding?” Davenport exclaimed. “We played those schools that moved from 6A to 5A (Chesterton and Merrillville) in the playoffs. Michigan City (Class 5A past and present) was on our schedule in regular season for the first time in a long time, too. The 5A football people are seeing in the Region today is full of teams from the who could beat almost any 6A school.”
Warsaw’s Class5A playoff path, other than its opening, strictly business 52-7 shellacking of Goshen in the opening round has been comprised of weekly dragon slaying when a trophy was on the line.
For those of you who have recently, and understandably, not paid as much attention to Tiger football while leaves were still clinging to the trees, Warsaw faced three weeks of a murderer’s row of top-ranked teams who also have rich high school football traditions.
Warsaw topped Northern Lakes Conference (NLC) outright winner, undefeated Class 5A, number one ranked Concord 31-28 in the second of two “game(s) for the ages” within a single season. This time, however, Warsaw was on the proper end of the final score.
Warsaw, based on the bracketing format, played two more playoff games at home, but the opponents were #2 Lafayette Jefferson, another undefeated foe, and Merrillville (#3), whose squad’s only loss was to another semistate participant last week, Duneland Conference Champion Class 6A Crown Point.
Tonight at 7 p.m. the Tigers will face Indiana’s fourth-ranked, 10-2 Decatur Central Hawks for the first time in an effort to earn the school its first ever state championship football trophy/
The 2024 Tigers tripled the 2019 Tigers’ contribution of postseason trophies to place behind glass on this season’s journey. Could they quadruple this output tonight?
Davenport, an all-NLC honorable mention who recorded more tackles than defensive ends typically earn in a season and led his team in that stat, as well as tackles for losses while doing so, talked about the journey from 2019 to 2024 instead of comparing the two squads.
“It gets me excited,” Davenport said while discussing the 2024 Tigers’ season to date. “There’s that little moment when you don’t want a record (first ever sectional championship team) to be broken, but you realized you were part of the setup of these steppingstones the guys are taking. The stuff we made in a path for future Tigers. It’s nice to see where the future teams (went) with what standards we set.”
It's said healthy trees are planted by people who are creating shade for others to enjoy years later.
The 2024 Tigers, while enjoying some of that shade, have fortified an even bigger, healthier tree for future teams in the Warsaw program, who before 2018, had never won at least seven games in seven consecutive seasons before 2018.
Coach Phil Jensen, whose 2017 campaign was his last in Warsaw, took the program’s reigns when people told him Warsaw was nothing more than a basketball school when Jensen came aboard in the mid-1990s.
Jensen’s teams started putting butts in the stands, and started giving teams like Plymouth and Goshen, traditionally strong during his early tenure, lots of agita when they had to travel to the Lake City.
Fast forward to 2024, and no program looks forward to playing here and facing a gridiron squad whose offense – capable of breakaway, quick scores with tosses to the perimeter, or direction-changing inside counter runs – mostly exhausts your defense with double-digit play scoring drives that suck at least eight minutes of life an opposing team will never get back.
Some athletes and fans stated they never heard a louder crowd in their lives.
Offensive and defensive schemes are more complex than they look, but Davenport explained how they were broken down for just about any kid’s comprehension speed to understand their complex progressions.
“I think Coach Curtis and the rest of the coaches found a way to break complicated things down in simple chunks. You know, we have a lot of different levels of learning ability on a football team. It’s not twelve guys like in basketball. The IQs, because you’re drawing from a way-bigger pool of kids than basketball and other sports are drawing, are all over the place. Our coaches had to make sure we all got smarter. You have to make sure everyone understands things before you add another twist to where we started each season.
“On top of that, look at these guys. What grade were they in when Curtis installed the offense and defense at all levels… what… fifth, sixth grade? These guys probably could probably sleepwalk rocket toss. Some of them have older brothers before them who spoke all the lingo, they probably have in memory motion at this point in their lives.”
The senior class, in fact, is comprised of kids in sixth grade during Curtis’s first season, 2018.
The conversation shifted gears to the physical effects of the game once postseason begins.
The beating a player takes throughout the season erodes muscle mass, so in modern football the most successful teams lift all season long.
“These guys made this trip to state when they started in the weight room,” Davenport noted. “My fortunes weren’t really just luck. My rewards matched my effort once I committed fully to the weight room during the middle, end and after my sophomore season. It helped that I was told the weight room was what was going to make me a more useful part of the team’s future seasons.
Davenport believed these Tigers of 2024, visibly bigger, and using their size very functionally, are working on some of the same things he worked on to prepare for larger opponents even though the 2024 Tigers size is visibly larger as well as functional to boot.
“(We worked on) explosiveness,” Davenport said regarding preparation for opponents typically 50 to 150 pounds heavier than he and his fellow linemen were. “Most of the bigger lines were slower so you worked on getting off the ball. When you reach this level of opposition, they’re quicker, too, so you’re figuring out their choice of direction or blocking technique when you watch film and figure your move out from that. I minimized my movement to be as efficient as possible.”
Davenport didn’t offer advice on game prep for the Tigers heading into a state finals clash he himself never reached, but he shed light on preparing for a long road trip.
“Could I really give these guys some advice for tonight’s contest?” Davenport asked rhetorically. “Not really, but I know what is going through their mind when it comes to a long bus ride where you pour out of a big yellow metal machine and suddenly have to get your body ready for the most intense level of violence I already had running through my mind during the bus ride without drawing flags.”
Tonight, unlike any other season, the 24 seniors stepping onto the Lucas Oil Stadium playing field know this is their final high school football game. Unlike the previous four weeks, wondering whether the season will end that particular night moved from abstract to concrete.
Davenport offered some thoughts on what some of these athlete’s last football game (at any level now or in the future) could possibly feel like for each of them.
“You might be dying out there, and you think you’re in pain you can’t bear, but when you’re in the very last high school game you know you’re going to play – like these guys are – your healing time is, like, the rest of your life, and it’s something that you can begin tomorrow. Today and tonight, none of these guys want to even think about tomorrow.”