It’s easy, with the gift of hindsight, to pretend that the 2020-21 high school sports year was a “normal” one. Every season ended with its usual slate of state championship competitions, and by spring, we were seeing spillover crowds again at postseason baseball and softball games.
It’s just as easy to forget that eleven months ago, none of us were sure that any of it was going to happen.
I remember one late summer day in particular, when Marion County was about to implement regulations that would have forced all of the Indianapolis high schools to postpone or cancel their 2020 high school football seasons. Whiteland athletic director Dave Edens, just weeks after taking the job, was faced with the prospect of filling as many as three holes in the Warriors’ schedule; outgoing Center Grove AD Jon Zwitt was preparing to rebuild the Trojans’ entire slate. Most of their peers in the area were similarly working the phones non-stop for a hot minute before the panic eventually subsided.
Both the Warriors and Trojans still wound up having to make last-minute schedule changes during the first two weeks of the football season, and cancellations and postponements were commonplace throughout the fall and winter seasons. Nearly every basketball and wrestling team in Johnson County was forced into a two-week quarantine at least once.
COVID-19 hit us with far more than just schedule changes. More than 600,000 Americans, and counting, have been lost to the pandemic, with Center Grove softball coaching legend Russ Milligan among them. (This virus should never have been taken as lightly as it was, and the fact that so many have now completely given up on fighting it is disheartening given the continued rise of different variants and the reluctance of many to get vaccinated.)
But after a brief hiatus a year ago, high school sports pushed forward — and while there were plenty of potholes in the road, we got to experience plenty of exhilarating highs that we weren’t certain we’d get to experience last July:
- Center Grove’s football team, led by a gaggle of studs who’ll be playing at Division I colleges this fall or in the near future, dominated nearly everyone in its path on the way to an unbeaten season, a spot in the national rankings and a blowout win in the Class 6A state championship game;
- The Franklin girls basketball team, paced by a finally healthy Kuryn Brunson and a crew of precocious freshmen, made about 18 million 3-pointers on its way to the Class 4A semistate. Greenwood Christian’s girls made the Class A semistate for the second year in a row;
- Johnson County swimmers made their usual strong showing, with Center Grove senior Ethan Martin winning a state championship in the 100-meter freestyle and Cade Oliver and Michael Couet representing Franklin at the U.S. Olympic Trials;
- Whiteland’s Will Jefferson and Center Grove’s Taylor Jarosinski reached the top of the podium at the state track and field meets, winning titles in the boys 3,200 meters and the girls pole vault, respectively;
- Keagan Rothrock, a Whiteland native, won Gatorade Player of the Year honors while pitching Roncalli’s softball team to a Class 4A state championship;
- The Center Grove boys golf team capped the spring in style, overcoming an early deficit to outduel Guerin Catholic for the state title in dramatic fashion.
Those are just some of the brightest highlights from what was another banner year in local sports; I don’t have enough space to list everything cool that happened here. And all of it seemed a little bit more gratifying given the backdrop of “we really didn’t know if any of this was going to happen last summer.”
We were all beyond glad to see sports actually return this past school year. The athletes needed it. The fans needed it. And after about five months of contortionist-level stretching to fill this section with remotely interesting material last spring and summer, you can be sure that Mike and I needed it.
We’re still not completely out of the COVID woods yet, but here’s hoping that the 2021-22 athletic cycle will be at least as rewarding, and far less mentally taxing, than the one we just went through.
Ryan O’Leary is the sports editor for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
