Evan McIntire (5) and a still-young Greenwood Christian football team hope to build on the successful moments from last year’s inaugural campaign, including a win at county rival Edinburgh.
Daily Journal file photo
Editor’s note: This is the last 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 Greenwood Christian, a quickly emerging Class A contender hoping to distance itself from a somewhat checkered past.
Coming to central Indiana after a lifetime in Michigan, Shon Cottle knew he was entering a different world when he agreed to become Greenwood Christian’s new athletic director.
He might have underestimated just how different.
The Indiana High School Athletic Association’s bylaws differ somewhat from what he was used to during his tenure at Northpointe Christian in Grand Rapids, but Cottle is fine with getting up to speed on the rules in his new home state.
Compliance with said rules, though, has been an issue in the not-too-distant past for GCA, which was placed on IHSAA probation in December of 2018 for boys basketball infractions, with allegations of similar wrongdoing (but no sanctions) in early 2021. The Cougars’ football program was given a warning this summer stemming from participation and undue influence transgressions last year.
The football violations were self-reported — coach Andre Dobson, like Cottle, came to Greenwood Christian from out of state and wasn’t familiar with how things are done in Indiana.
Going forward, though, Cottle won’t accept that from GCA’s coaches or from himself.
“I want to do things the right way,” he said. “I don’t want to unintentionally do something — and not knowing, to me, is not a good excuse.”
On that front, Cottle says, the buck will stop with him. He held a meeting with all of his coaches this week in which he made clear what his expectations are for conducting business. The idea is to provide strong guidance for everyone within the athletic department — something that he’s been told was lacking in recent years.
“I get more that they’re wanting leadership and wanting direction that they don’t feel that they’ve been given or supported in the past,” Cottle said.
Missteps aside, GCA has enjoyed plenty of athletic success in recent years. The boys soccer team made a Cinderella run to the Class A state championship game last fall, the first such appearance for the school in any sport. The Cougars made it to a baseball semistate just last month, and the girls basketball team advanced that far in 2020 and 2021.
While Cottle would like to build on that — winning a state championship in any sport is very much near the top of his goal list — his big-picture vision is creating a culture that breeds consistent and sustainable success, and not just one-off runs that might be the product of one strong class.
“I want us to always be competing for conference and sectional championships in every sport,” Cottle said. “Whether we win them every year or not, that’s not necessarily — but our goal is, we should be in that conversation every year. … and when somebody gets the sectional bracket and they look at it and they see GCA on there, I want them to be worried about playing GCA. …
“I think it starts there. Once you’re consistently doing that, then the regional championships and the state championships will come. We think that that’s a reasonable goal.”
A public school product himself, Cottle is aware of the reputation that follows private schools in general — and from a local standpoint, Greenwood Christian in particular — when it comes to accusations of recruiting, deserved or not. He points out that the Cougars play their home football games at Center Grove Middle School Central and says that he’d like to avoid making enemies with his neighbors.
Kids will continue to make the leap from public to private as they always have, Cottle says, but gone are the days of GCA coaches traversing the county and actively trying to lure the county’s top athletes as if they’re marlin fishing.
“I know that there will be someone from Greenwood, someone from those schools there are all of a sudden going to come to GCA,” he said. “The reality is, if I’m the No. 10 guy at Center Grove and I know that I can go to GCA and be the No. 1 or 2 guy there — that stuff, I know it happens. But it better not be because my coach is over there poaching from them. I want to maintain a relationship with them. … I want them to be allies. We aren’t a threat to them, or shouldn’t be a threat to them, at our size school.”
Greenwood Christian expects to have just over 200 students in 2023-24, a number that would still leave it battling Edinburgh for the title of smallest high school in Johnson County. Such numbers present plenty of challenges — perhaps most notably trying to grow a football program entering its second year without cannibalizing boys soccer, fresh off the most successful postseason that any Cougar team has ever had.
Cottle says that Dobson and first-year soccer coach Steve Campbell both seem willing to share players in an effort to avoid having one sport kill the other. Still, with about 30 players out for football and 15 or 16 out for soccer, both sports are varsity only this fall — a situation that Cottle hopes to rectify in the future.
“I want JV football too, because not every 105-pound freshman is ready to hit a full-grown man that’s 18 years old,” he said. “I do worry about those things, but those are things that we’ll address as we go.”
Those on-field issues are ones that Cottle will get a better feel for once he’s had his boots on the ground for a bit; he’s done this job before and knows how to handle that part. There are, however, off-the-field factors that he hasn’t really encountered before.
Cottle enters the picture during a major transitional period at GCA; his predecessor, Devin Gray, stands accused of stealing thousands of dollars from the school and could be facing felony charges. Additionally, the school opted this spring not to renew the contract of former superintendent Mike Chitty.
As he met his new colleagues around Johnson County for the first time this summer, Cottle said he heard jokes about that still-developing situation but said that individually, he feels he’s being welcomed and given a fair shake — which is all he’s asking for.
“I’m my own person, and I want to be judged for who I am,” Cottle said.
While he can’t do anything about the Gray matter, Cottle is eager to set his own tone and help make Cougar athletics stronger than ever.
He’s been brought up to speed on GCA’s past; his focus is on the future.
“Now I’m just trying to own it, and let’s plow forward,” he said.
