In just the second year of the split into two middle schools Westchester brings an undefeated record into tonight’s cross-town rivalry season finale vs. Liberty at Chesterton High School

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

The expansion back to two Chesterton middle schools after a two decades with one meant twice as many students would have opportunities to play in athletic contests, not just watch them from the bench.
And then there was football, where two questions hovered:
1. In the final season before the talent was split in half, Chesterton Middle School went into the last week of the season still in search of its first touchdown, so how in the world was a team with half the numbers supposed to compete?
2. Some students opted to play Pop Warner instead of for the school, so would there be enough to fill two rosters at each school with an A team and a B team, both filled with seventh and eighth graders?
Words could never answer those questions as well as these numbers: 8-0 and 6-1-1.
Those are the records of Westchester’s A and B teams, heading into today’s cross-town rival games vs. Liberty at Chesterton High School. The B game kicks off at 5:30 p.m., followed by the A game.
The Westchester A team has clinched at least a tie with Hobart for the Lake and Porter County Conference championship. A win tonight would make it an outright championship.
The first step to engineering the turnaround came when Chesterton head coach Mark Peterson approached Pop Warner president Tom Troy, whose sons Josh and Ethan played for Peterson, to discuss the numbers crunch. Troy offered to disband the Pop Warner team in the age group of seventh and eighth graders.
The summer before the split, Peterson organized six 90-minute clinics on Mondays to spark interest and grow numbers.
Troy was hired to coach Westchester, he hired five assistant coaches from the Pop Warner ranks, and two years later, a storybook season comes to an end tonight.
Future teammates are current opponents, which has the potential for bad blood, but Peterson sees the bright side of the rivalry.
“The in-school grudge creates bragging rights for each school,” Peterson said. “I think that’s a cool thing. I think having a competitive edge with each other is certainly exciting and really kind of fun as well.”
As with anything, social media shines a light on the dark side of the rivalry.
“Right now there is a lot of stuff that has been going on,” said Troy, who has coached football for 18 years, mostly in Pop Warner. “It happened last year, and it’s happening again this year, a lot of talk with the kids and the social media stuff and even some parents, and rumors. All that stuff.”
Troy has an idea of how to minimize that and maximize working together for the majority of the season, instead of working apart, building toward one game at the end of the season.
“What I wish, I wish that every town, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Colonel Wheeler and Taft, Fegley and Willow Creek, and our two teams, let everyone play those games at the start of the season,” Troy said. “Get it out of the way and then you don’t have that animosity building all season.”
Troy would like to see that happen so that players from rival schools can form bonds that build all year getting a head start on that instead of waiting until they are in high school together.
“After playing the game the first week, hey, let’s scrimmage with each other,” Troy said. “We’ll come over to you and you come over to us. Let’s work together to see what we can do to help each other get better. But when you put them as your opponent in the last game, it makes you feel I don’t want them to see what we’re doing too much because when we go to play them we want to win, and if something major’s on the line like there is this year, you’re not going to do that.”
Troy doesn’t apologize for believing that not only teaching the techniques that lead to winning is a big part of the mission, but so too is winning itself. For one thing, winning leads to higher retention numbers, and not just for the A team. That’s one reason he doesn’t stack all the best players on the A team and push the rest to the B team.
“Those 30 kids you threw over here (on the B team) and maybe aren’t the best kids, and you have everybody stacked over here (on the A team), the players on the B team might not come back and play next year because they had a horrible experience,” Troy said. “And then you have maybe 10 guys standing on the sideline over here on the A team, not even on the field. What good is that doing them?”
So he splits the talent in a way that makes the A team better overall than the B team but not at the expense of everything else. Everybody plays, and the athletes with the most potential play the most snaps, whether it be on the A team, the B team or a little of both.
Dual-threat quarterback Noah Kent is the player generating the loudest buzz for Westchester. Much of the talk centers on the speed he shows on breakaway runs, even though this is an eighth grader who in the last game threw a touchdown pass that traveled 52 yards in the air, Troy said.
“He has good grades,” Troy said. “He’s a decent size kid. He definitely puts in the work. Super nice kid.”
Kent wears No. 14 as a way of honoring his father because that’s what he wore at his high school in Illinois.
Kent played on the B team last year, when both Westchester teams went 6-3 in the first year of the split. Logan Leverenz, who made a strong impression on the Chesterton freshman team this season, played QB for the A team.
Splitting them enabled both Leverenz and Kent to develop at the position and resulted in both teams experiencing winning.
“Kent was good enough to play A team and we could have used Logan as a fullback possibly, but my objective is don’t give all the talent to one team and leave this other team hanging out to dry,” Troy said.
His players stay on the field for offense and defense. Kent, for example, is an outside linebacker.
“I love it,” Kent said of playing linebacker. “I like it when the quarterback rolls out. I have the chance to come up and make the big tackle.”
Westchester has won blowouts and close games alike.
Kent shared some of the lessons he has learned in helping to preserve an undefeated season.
“You can’t ever hang your head if you’re losing,” he said. “In the Taft game, we were down 14-0 at halftime, and we didn’t get sad or low energy. We hyped up each other and made big plays and we won that game.That was nice.”
Kent said that from watching Taft on film, he didn’t think he and teammates would have any trouble winning the game, another lesson learned, Kent said: “Don’t ever doubt your opponent.”
To that end, Kent, when asked what sort of opponent he faces in the season finale, said of Liberty, “They’re a good one.”
He and Troy both said that Liberty running back Carson Sartin, No. 34, is a handful.
“He’s fast,” Troy said. “He’s a guy who if he breaks your ankles and gets around you, he’s going to take it to the house. He’s fast.”
Talent runs in cycles, and this season, Westchester has the advantage, and not just at quarterback. Westchester has big linemen, Troy said, and Liberty has a number of players who “haven’t hit their growth spurt yet.”
Beyond Kent, Troy cited Mason Brant, Sam Crothers, Noah Rhinehart, injured TJ Simmons, and placekicker Aren Whitenack as among the standouts who have played a big role in preserving the undefeated record.
He also praised the skill and commitment of assistant coaches Corey Conlin, Bevan Coulopoulos, Todd Eichenberger, Kodie Farrington and Jeff Phillips.
The commitment started long before the season.
“The goal is to keep coming back to play football, so what we did last year and this year and most programs don’t do, we would start a few months early just to get the kids coming out in the summer,” Troy said of voluntary workouts. “You might only get 10 kids. Then after a month, now you’ve got 13, then a couple of weeks later, you’ve got 15, then before you know it, before school starts you’ve got the whole team coming out.”
At the same time, Troy said he encourages athletes to compete for their schools in the winter and spring, so he shares more with Peterson than much of the varsity coach’s terminology on offense.
“Do we want them playing other sports? Yes. We don’t want them on the street corner or playing video games or whatever,” he said. “We want them playing football, then when football season is over, go get involved in wrestling or track or whatever it may be. The goal is to keep coming back to play football.”