In a normal year, the spring sports postseason would be upon us. Alas, the COVID-19 pandemic wiped the entire spring schedule clean, bringing the 2019-20 athletic campaign to a premature end.
Over the coming weeks, we’re taking a look back and reviewing each Johnson County high school’s year in sports. Today’s focus: the Indian Creek Braves.
His heart broken and his mind numb, Owen Sego made the walk in front of the home bleachers at Indian Creek’s football stadium.
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Those in attendance would have understood had Sego, a running back for the Braves, chosen not to take part in senior night festivities. A day earlier, his father, Neil, was one of five people who perished in a plane crash near Lansing, Michigan.
Neil Sego was 46, and Owen’s best friend.
Tamara Whitten, mother of Braves’ senior defensive lineman Avery Whitten, passed away on the day of that home game against Indianapolis Manual. Avery Whitten, too, chose to be part of senior night.
In a sport in which toughness is measured by helmet scuff marks, the thoroughness of a tackle or second and third effort, Sego and Whitten demonstrated theirs by embodying what it’s like to be part of a team during the darkest moments.
“I don’t remember the actual game much, but remember walking out there with my family,” said Sego, who played against Manual, rushing for 107 yards and scoring twice in Indian Creek’s 57-8 victory. “I just felt like my dad would want me to play on senior night because I would only have once chance at it.”
Football season alone featured its share of highs and lows, the positives being the immediate impact made by transfers Roman Purcell and Connor Fruits, who came in from two of the state’s premier programs, Warren Central and Center Grove.
Purcell, a senior quarterback who could run and pass with equal proficiency, led Indian Creek to a 7-3 record. Fruits, a junior running back who joined the team in time for a Week 5 win over visiting Triton Central, finished the season with 878 yards rushing.
The Braves’ 10-week gridiron whirlwind contained a little bit of everything, including tears and tackles shed.
“It was probably the strangest year of football that I’ve ever been part of,” said former Braves coach Brett Cooper, who announced in December that he was leaving to take the job at Perry Meridian. “We have two kids who suffer tragedy, we bounce back to win the (Western Indiana Conference) championship and then lose in the first round of the sectional.
“It was definitely challenging. We dealt with four or five things in one season that most people don’t deal with in a career.”
A loss at Franklin to open the season didn’t deter Indian Creek’s boys basketball squad, which rattled off 10 consecutive wins and briefly appeared in the Class 3A top 10. The Braves’ final record of 18-7 marked its most victories in a season this century.
Led by seniors Xavier Ferris, Colby Marker and Jordan Watson, Indian Creek weathered a three-game losing streak — including a 69-45 beating at Sullivan in the WIC title game — during a season mostly filled with positive memories.
“We won 18 games, and that’s the most that’s been won here in a while,” coach Drew Glentzer said. “Senior kids are always trying to outdo the kids who were here before them. It was the first time we had played for a conference championship and the first time in the modern era we had played for a sectional championship.
“Over the course of any year, you say, ‘Boy, I’d like to have those games back.’ For the most part, it was a fun ride.”
As much as Glentzer wanted his team to win a sectional, looking back, he figures it would have been even tougher to win it as Beech Grove did and then never get a chance to play the regional because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Indian Creek girls also qualified for the sectional final but were ousted by Indianapolis Ritter, 67-55, to finish 15-11.
Sego ended his Indian Creek athletic career at the Ford Center in Evansville in February, a wrestling semistate qualifier for the fourth consecutive season. The 170-pounder finished his final prep season with a 24-6 record at 170 pounds.
Another senior, swimmer Chase Smith, bravely continued his ongoing battle against the cancer that first invaded his body in July 2014. In April, just weeks after competing in the state meet for the third and final time, Smith found out that Ewing’s sarcoma had come back for a fifth time and that he likely had just a couple of months to live.
Overall, the 2019-20 school year at Indian Creek will be remembered for accepting new persons while comforting those who had to say goodbye to longstanding members of the community.
“That was a first, having the two kids have a parent pass away in the same week. We leaned on each other a lot, put our arms around each other and got through. The same thing with the COVID-19 situation,” said Indian Creek athletic director Derek Perry, a 1997 graduate of the school.
“It’s just helping each other out. People here are caring. They’re helpful. I’ve lived in this community for 40 years and nothing has changed.”
