Week 15 football preview: ‘Go-to guy’ Benton, S. Putnam final obstacle for Pioneer’s ‘iron men’ in state title bid

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

Class 1A state championship game: Pioneer (13-1) vs. South Putnam (12-2), 11 a.m. Friday at Lucas Oil Stadium, Indianapolis

The Pioneer football team’s ground game reliance continued in their 31-14 win over host South Adams in the semistate Friday.

Pioneer ran the ball 62 times and passed it three. All 374 yards of offense came on the ground. Fullback Noah VanMeter ran 25 times for 185 yards and two touchdowns, right wingback Shiloh Rine ran 15 times for 79 yards and a touchdown, and left wingback Phillip McFatridge had 61 yards rushing on 12 carries.

The game also marked the re-emergence on the ground of quarterback Micah Rans, who had nine carries for 50 yards, including a 28-yard touchdown run. Rans, who broke the school record for rushing yards in a game with 325 in a win over North Miami in September, had only three carries for 10 yards in Pioneer’s previous two games combined.

Still, Pioneer, who averages 8.5 yards per carry for the season as a team, ran for just 6.0 yards per carry.

The score after one quarter was 0-0. Pioneer coach Adam Berry was asked if this required his team to be more patient.

“You could tell we’re a year older, a year more mature,” Berry said. “Because we were still moving the ball early on. We just weren’t converting those key short yardage plays that we’ve been doing in previous weeks. And this group, they did not seem stressed about it or anything. They just stuck with the plan. We started converting those short yardage plays that resulted in points.”

Defensively, Pioneer held South Adams quarterback Tytus Lehman to just 197 yards passing. It was only the third time this season that Lehman had been held under 200 yards passing. 

Lehman averaged just 10.9 yards per completion. Only Class 2A regional champion Adams Central and Bluffton, a top 10 team in Class 2A, held him to a lower per-completion average.

Also, Lehman had not thrown an interception in four straight games coming into the semistate, but both Eli Guffey and Rine picked him off.

Both of South Adams’ touchdowns came on passes from Lehman to Wesley Summersett, but by then, Pioneer had amassed a 24-0 lead.

Berry said that defensive coordinator Matt Vianco’s gameplan reemphasized keeping South Adams’ receivers in front.

“We knew an offense like South Adams’ – their quarterback, their receivers – we knew they were going to complete passes,” Berry said. “We knew they were going to get yards, but we wanted to prevent the huge home run play. I think their longest completion happened off a tipped ball. Shiloh Rine broke well on it, and it just bounced off his helmet, and it seriously went up in the air probably 15 feet, and number 9 (Summersett) came up with it. It was just one of those plays where he made. And then another play number 9 made was double coverage in the end zone, and he got two feet in in the back of the end zone. I just thought our coverage overall was tremendous. Our defensive line, I think we had two sacks, but the pressure was enough to throw off the timing. I just couldn’t be happier with our defense because when we weren’t scoring early, it was our defense that was getting us the ball back and really controlling the game for us.”

Eagles fly to semistate title

If Indiana is the Crossroads of America, then South Putnam High School might be the crossroads of Indiana, as it is located on East U.S. 40 in Greencastle and accessible to Lafayette, Bloomington, Terre Haute and Indianapolis.

Located about 45 miles southwest of Lucas Oil Stadium, Greencastle is also accessible to U.S. 231 and I-70.

South Putnam is another school that came of the consolidation boom of the late 1960s, sprouting up in 1969 and servicing the towns of Belle Union, Fillmore and Reelsville.

They immediately established a football tradition, winning a state title in 1986 – they beat North Judson, coached by current Knox coach Russ Radtke, in the state title game – in just the second year of the modern IHSAA state tournament format. That was part of a run from 1985-89 in which they won five straight sectionals and four regionals under coach Mark Wildman.

Wildman won another sectional in 1991. His 2001-02 teams flirted with glory again. They lost to Perry Central in the 2001 semistate before avenging that loss in the 2002 semistate. That season ended with a loss to Southwood in the state championship game.

To this day, South Putnam’s home stadium is named Mark Wildman Field.

Troy Burgess replaced Wildman in 2006 and won sectionals in 2011 and 2013. Nathan Aker replaced Burgess in 2014 and won a sectional in his final season in 2018.

Aker then left to take the coaching job at Monrovia, and Chuck Sorrell was hired to replace him. Sorrell, who won just four games in three years as the coach at South Vermillion, has the Eagles flying high again.

After his time as a head coach at South Vermillion ended in 2013, he re-established himself as a defensive coordinator at Cascade and a special teams coordinator at Northview before becoming a head coach again at South Putnam.

“I had my eye on this place because of South Putnam’s tradition as a football school,” Sorrell told the Banner Graphic in 2019 upon his hiring. “The people here love football.”

Sorrell went 5-6 in his first season but has posted six straight winning seasons since. They have also averaged 40 or more points per game for four straight seasons.

South Putnam won 12 games and a sectional in 2020 before falling to Covenant Christian in the regional. Last year, they were 1-2 after two games before ripping off a 10-game winning streak. They lost to Providence 35-30 in the semistate, but the 30 points were the most that undefeated Providence allowed all season.

South Putnam is a member of the Western Indiana Conference. They are the only Class 1A football school in the six-team conference. South Putnam’s first eight games were against Class 2A and Class 3A schools. Their losses were to Class 3A Edgewood by one point in overtime and to Class 4A Northview, who won eight games and averaged 47 points per game.

Perhaps their most impressive win was a 29-21 win in overtime over previously undefeated Riverton Parke in the sectional final. They followed it with a 26-6 win over Sheridan in the regional and a 40-7 win over Milan in the semistate.

Sorrell told the Putnam County Post that many of the current players are sons or nephews of players from the 2001-02 teams. Now they try to finish off a state title the way their fathers and uncles were unable to.

Stopping Benton and Cline

Pioneer’s only loss was to Knox and star quarterback Myles McLaughlin, who broke the season and career state rushing records and who flirted with Derrick Henry’s national rushing record.

The state’s No. 2 rusher is South Putnam’s Ty Benton, who has rushed for 2,452 yards and 26 touchdowns on 10.7 yards per carry. Brier Cook ran for 784 yards on 7.5 yards per carry, and quarterback Drew Cline ran for 476 yards on 6 yards per carry.

“He is a patient runner,” Berry said of Benton. “And then he sees that hole, he hits it hard. He’s just a tremendous back. Their coach isn’t afraid to say they’re looking to get him the ball. He is obviously their go-to guy. However, they do have enough weapons around him.”

South Putnam is not one-dimensional. Cline also has over 2,000 yards and 25 touchdowns passing. Three different receivers – Bransyn Ensor, Khalil Jefferson and Blake Witt – have over 20 receptions, and Ensor and Jefferson average over 20 yards per catch.

“They definitely want to establish the run, but they can also sling it around a little bit to their athletes on the outside,” Berry said. “So once again, we’re going to have to defend the whole field. It’s not a team that we can sell out on the run, even though we need to obviously stop their running back. But we’re going to have to play a disciplined ballgame.”

Perhaps the biggest force on defense is linebacker Keenan Mowery-Shields, who has 229 tackles, including 18.5 for loss. He had 27 tackles against Milan last week.

Mowery-Shields is also a state qualifier in wrestling, where he lost to Rochester’s Declan Gard in the first round at heavyweight at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in February.

“He’s 6-3 and 240 pounds, and it is a built 240 pounds,” Berry said. “He can move very well for his size, and he will stick you in the hole if you don’t get bodies on him. They have some size up front that takes on blockers and allows those three to four (linebackers), depending on what look they’re in, to run free. So our key is going to get up to the second level, so they cannot just scrape over the top with freedom where they can’t just shoot into the hole without being untouched, so that’s definitely a key of ours this coming week.”

Practice before a state championship game

Both teams practiced for an hour at Lucas Oil Stadium Wednesday. The IHSAA keeps strict time of the hour “with no leeway,” according to Berry.

Berry said the team also practiced in Royal Center Wednesday. Berry said practicing at home the same day of your practice at Lucas Oil runs contrary to what he did prior to the 2016 state championship game against Linton-Stockton. Pioneer lost that game 34-20.

In 2017 and 2018, he changed up the routine to include a practice at home, and Pioneer won back-to-back state titles against Eastern Greene and North Vermillion, respectively.

“There we’re going to get some special teams in just to kind of get the footing,” Berry said of how he planned to spend their Lucas Oil practice time. “We’re going to get some passing in, and then whatever we don’t get done at Lucas Oil, we’re coming back to Pioneer to finish up practice. That’s something we did learn after the 2016 season. We didn’t quite finish our day on that Wednesday, so we’re coming back to practice and finish up what we don’t get accomplished down at Lucas Oil. We haven’t really changed our practice plan too much. We don’t go full tackle anyway. So if a guy goes to the ground, we try to blow the whistle before that happens. Generally, we aren’t full tackle the way it is, so really we are not changing what we’re doing much of anything when it comes to contact practices.”

The Pioneer ‘iron men’

Indianapolis Star high school sports editor Kyle Neddenriep noted in a social media post that Pioneer’s scoring average (38.1) is a higher number than the number of players on the team (31).

Meanwhile, South Putnam lists 59 players on their roster.

Still, Pioneer getting this far is a tribute to their ability to reach back for something extra during a grueling 15-week season.

Now they are just one win away from the fourth state title in school history.

“We play iron man football,” Berry said. “When I started, we were fortunate enough to be in the mid-40s. Obviously, that provides some more depth, but really, over my 10 years, we really have about the same amount of guys that go one way or go two ways. So we’ve always had that iron man mindset of if you’re one of the top 11 offensive players, you may also be one of the top 11 defensive players. We only have 31 guys, but we love our 31 guys and feel like even though we have a lot of guys that can go both ways, there are quite a few that can get in there and provide some quality minutes. Especially the younger guys have really stepped up this postseason run and shown that they can provide some minutes on a Friday.”