Multi-part series spotlighting small-school football to launch here Aug. 1

A series aimed to showcase small-high school and small-college football in Indiana is scheduled to launch here at “Photo Potpourri” on Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023. 

The series, titled "On Hoosier Gridirons," is the culmination of a lengthy project to research, interview and write the stories -- and to collect and size pictures that will drop into the 16 chapters of the story. “On Hoosier Gridirons” also will represent the first use of this blog to host a major writing project.

The series gives props to small schools, which often get the short shrift of attention and media coverage in all athletic competitions. The author aspires to do this by using a parallel timeline to follow the early life stories of two excellent quarterbacks, Eric Watt and Kyle Ray. They were from the same grade year (high school Class of 2007) but attended and played football for high schools and private colleges at opposite ends of Indiana.

Watt and Ray never faced each other on the gridiron in high school, but on Sept. 26, 2009, in their junior years of college, they started opposite each other in a non-conference battle of emerging small-college football powers in Indiana. The contest between Trine University and Franklin College was decided by a single point, thanks to the heroics of a third quarterback, Nick Purichia, whose back story also gets a chapter in the series.

“On Hoosier Gridirons” dovetailed from the blog author's 2010s personal “game day” project to visit every small college in Indiana with a football program and photograph a football game at each campus. He then posted the best pictures from each stop at this blog, connecting them with the common blog-post tag “game day.”

The 2009 Trine-Franklin game was the first stop on the “tour,” which concluded in 2016. Subsequent stops on the tour were made at Hanover College, Wabash College, DePauw University, Marian University, the University of St. Francis (Fort Wayne), Taylor University, the University of Indianapolis,  St. Joseph's College, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Manchester University, Trine University, Anderson University and Earlham College.

The photo leading off the post is a screen grab of the manuscript cover of the writing project. That's Eric Watt (in his Trine road jersey) on the left, and Kyle Ray (in his home Franklin College jersey) on the right.