When Darrin Fisher became the varsity football coach at Whiteland in 2005, he was coming to a Class 4A school with an enrollment of about 1,250 students.
Things done changed.
As the 2021-22 school year begins, Fisher is looking at an entirely different world. High school enrollment has passed the 2,000 mark — and if the Warriors aren’t bumped up to Class 6A football when the IHSAA realigns in 2022, they definitely will be during the next classification cycle.
Whiteland’s rapid growth isn’t just an issue for Fisher, but for the entire school system. The high school hasn’t undergone any major renovations since the mid-1990s, when life was considerably different.
“The core of that building and sections of it were built at a time where the school had under 1,000 students,” Clark-Pleasant superintendent Patrick Spray noted.
In preparation for the inevitable move to 6A, Whiteland has started the process of beefing up its football schedule. Greenfield-Central, a 4A team that offered little resistance against the Warriors in 2018 and 2018 (the 2020 meeting was wiped out due to COVID-19 contact tracing), was replaced on the slate by Lawrence North, a Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference squad.
The Wildcats offer a better representation of what the Warriors will see in the state tournament in the not-too-distant future.
“We need to play 6A schools,” Whiteland athletic director Dave Edens said. “We need to play MIC competition and see where we’re at — because that’s where we’re going to be. By the time these freshmen are seniors, there’s no doubt they’re going to be playing 6A football.
“We have to prepare ourselves for that and be able to compete, and get our kids used to thinking that way instead of, ‘Oh, we can’t beat those schools because they’re bigger.’ So we need to see those schools and we need to be able to take that mental part out of it.”
Fisher said that while an effort was made to step the nonconference scheduling up a few years ago, his program wasn’t quite ready for it; Week 2 games against Center Grove from 2011 to 2016 were largely uncompetitive.
The coach regularly stresses a balance between pride and humility — a team that’s confident in its abilities but aware of how much it needs to improve — and he feels like the Warriors are in a far better place in that regard than they were five years ago.
“Scheduling is everything,” Fisher said. “Who you schedule is really important. When you play them, where you play them and who you play. And I’m pleased with our schedule right now.
“You make progress when you play somebody difficult but you don’t lose your pride. That’s when you make progress. So the Lawrence North game is going to be a great game for us — assuming that we don’t lose our pride.”
As much as the on-field components matter in terms of Whiteland’s ascent into the upper echelon of Indiana high schools size-wise, the growth in enrollment doesn’t just impact football. Even though the Warriors have been in the state’s largest class in every other sport for a few years now, jumping up into that top 32 means something different.
It means you’re running with the big dogs.
Whiteland ranked 37th in IHSAA enrollment numbers in 2019; as recently as 2013, the school was 52nd. Everyone in the district knows what that sort of rise means in terms of upgrading facilities.
Spray said that small committees have already been formed to look into potential changes to the high school campus. Recommendations will likely be made within the next few months, with designs and then construction to follow.
Nobody denies that the high school athletic facilities will look significantly different in 2025 than it does now — but where the changes come remains to be seen. Gym space is an issue, as is the swimming pool; having six lanes and 25 yards won’t cut it anymore in a county that now has two Olympic-size pools.
“The way schools work now, it’s a competition,” Edens said. “Kids can go wherever they want, and athletic facilities matter when kids are looking at schools.”
Facilities do matter, but so does funding. As much as Edens might like to add both a fieldhouse and a 50-meter pool, as Center Grove has done in the last four years, Whiteland might have to pick one or the other. Which one would better fill the needs of the students and the community? Some thought will need to go into answering such questions — and getting local residents on board with whatever the project ends up looking like will definitely matter.
“It’s going to be important to have that support when you’re talking about a project that could be north of $50 million,” Spray said. ” And that sounds like a big number until you try to build a pool.”
Construction projects aside, Whiteland is treating the eventual bump up to 6A football as a reminder that the school is among Indiana’s largest, and it’s trying to act accordingly — not just on the gridiron, but everywhere.
If it’s within reach for the Zionsvilles and the Westfields of the world, the Warriors don’t feel out of line in expecting the same sooner than later.
“No matter what, we’re trying to get better,” Edens said. “We know who we have to compete with in Johnson County as a big school, and a lot of our programs aren’t there yet. So it’s building up to that point.
“You can’t say, ‘Well, we’re not a soccer community; we can’t compete.’ No. We’re not going to have that mindset anymore. We’ve just got to get better.”
It’s just part of the expectation when you get bigger.
