Coach Eric Moore, front and center, and his Center Grove football team have won three consecutive Class 6A state championships but open the 2023 season with five games against out-of-state opponents.
Daily Journal file photo
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series taking stock of where each of Johnson County’s high school athletic departments stand heading into the 2023-24 school year. Today we take a look at Center Grove, which has had more recent sporting success than any local school yet still faces hurdles ahead, most notably navigating independence.
Joe Bronkella never acquired an IHSAA state finals medal during his five-year tenure as the athletic director at Madison. His first year in the same position at Center Grove played out far differently.
During the fall season alone, Bronkella watched the Trojans win a third consecutive Class 6A football state championship and finish as the state runner-up in girls golf. Center Grove’s wrestling team was second in the state this past winter, and the baseball team advanced to the Class 4A state final last month. The school’s athletes also won four individual state titles — Mia Prusiecki in diving, Charlie LaRocca in wrestling and both Parker Doyle and the 4×400 relay team in boys track.
“My medal counts have increased drastically compared to the none that I had prior to being here,” Bronkella said, pointing to the budding collection on his office wall.
Such is life as the head of Johnson County’s sporting Voltron, an across-the-board powerhouse that may be the most successful overall athletic program in the state outside of Carmel. But while Bronkella certainly shares the community’s thirst for winning, he says his time at Madison taught him to never treat those victories as automatic.
He’s lived through enough ups and downs to know that the ups aren’t a birthright. Putting on that red and white Trojan uniform does not necessarily guarantee anything.
“I don’t want to ever take for granted that when we go have the success,” Bronkella said, “because I’ve been on the other side of it, where we didn’t have the success, and I feel like it helped keep me grounded.”
Staying grounded will be important for Bronkella and the Trojans going forward, because while it is good to be king here in the southern half of the state, there are still legitimate hurdles for Center Grove to clear.
The largest of those, of course, is finding enough opponents to fill schedules as an independent. Center Grove was voted out of the Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference just months before Bronkella took the job — and while he credits his predecessor, Scott Knapp, with finding enough short-term deals to fill out the 2022-23 schedules on short notice, Bronkella has plenty of work left ahead of him in terms of the near and more distant future.
Some sports, he notes, have been harder to fill out than others. The 2023 football schedule, for example, was a work in progress from the beginning of the school year all the way through until late May, when former MIC compatriot Pike opted in to a Week 7 slot that was briefly set to be filled by a visit from Boston powerhouse Catholic Memorial.
“Football’s the biggest hurdle,” Bronkella said, “but soccer is still tough to fill; finding those last couple of games that we were short is tough. Wrestling is very hard to fill — we’re still going to be a little bit short unless we can find something the (MIC) conference weekend.”
Helping matters could be a partial thaw in the recently frosty relationship between Center Grove and Carmel. While much was made of the Greyhounds’ desire to release themselves from any and all contracted matchups with the Trojans, the two rival schools will be playing one another this fall in volleyball, girls golf and boys tennis. Football, soccer and basketball are still off the table for now, but Bronkella, a longtime friend of Carmel assistant AD Jeff Hester dating back to their days working together in Columbus (Bronkella was a middle school AD when Hester was the AD at Columbus North), is hopeful that the two schools can continue to rebuild a mutually beneficial relationship.
“We’ll take the games we can get,” Bronkella said, “because the competition on that side of town is very helpful for us, and I would assume it’s helpful for them as well.”
Adding Carmel back to the football schedule one day would be a particularly big deal; there are only so many schools in Indiana willing to play the Trojans, which is why the first five teams on Center Grove’s 2023 schedule are out-of-state opponents. Bronkella managed to work it out so that four of those five games are at home — a top priority given that Week 1 involves a five-hour drive each way to Massillon, Ohio for a game against Cleveland-area power St. Edward.
Bronkella is trying to subject his teams to as few of those journeys as possible.
“I know long rides stink,” he said, “and we don’t want to put a team into a situation where they’re doing a ton of out-of-town — even out-of-state, depending on who you are — travel. So when designing a schedule, it’s got to be very understanding of, hey, if we’re going to go to Canton, Ohio in Week 1, I don’t want anything else out of state. That’s a long drive. That’s a lot for our families. I know our families have streaming options, (but) it’s just so much more of an environment and atmosphere for our kids if we can have their families available.”
Managing travel aside, Center Grove has got it pretty good at the moment. Nearly all of the athletic facilities have received significant upgrades in the last decade, with the latest addition a new softball hitting facility that includes golf simulators for those teams to use during the offseason.
Though most of the big-ticket items have been taken care of, Bronkella will always be looking for ways to keep Center Grove a step ahead of the competition.
“I think we have an excellent foundation, excellent facilities, so we are ahead of a lot of people,” he said. “Ours is going to be retention and maintaining, and then what’s the next thing that’s going to help us.”
Something that’s helped the Trojans over the years has been an enviable amount of stability in the coaching ranks. Center Grove has only replaced four varsity coaches in the last four years, and one of those (swimming coach Brad Smith) came on board with a generation’s worth of experience at neighboring Indian Creek.
Having such a secure foundation, from longtime football coach Eric Moore on down, is a luxury that most schools don’t enjoy — and that, probably more so than top-of-the-line facilities, has been a driving force behind all of the trophies that Center Grove has collected in recent years.
But what makes that veteran coaching staff special, Bronkella says, is a constant desire to get better. The Trojans continue to get more than their fair share of laurels, but they’re not going to rest on them anytime soon.
“Everyone can always improve,” the AD said. “So having intentional looks at, what are some things we’d like to work on? What are some things that are working well for us? But also being adaptive. … (Moore) has been adaptive all these years. He still does his same ritualistic stuff, but having that adaptability, and look at what success, 20-some years later, that he’s had consistently over and over again. He still will, ‘Oh, we need to look at this’ or ‘we need to absorb this.’
“Just always growing, always learning.”
