The sprawling grounds encompassing Indian Creek Elementary, Intermediate, Middle and Senior High Schools in the town of Trafalgar in southern Indiana are in direct view of motorists southbound on State Road 135 when the road reaches its junction with SR 252, a T-intersection.
The
schools are in the Nineveh1-Hensley-Jackson United School Corp.,
named for the three townships it serves (Nineveh and Hensley in Johnson County,
Jackson in Morgan County). Indian Creek is the name of a stream that
flows through each of those three townships.
The N-H-J grounds are large enough to include all the necessary facilities for a school system’s sports teams, including a football field surrounded by a running track. There also are baseball and softball diamonds, tennis courts and several practice fields, as well as plenty of parking spaces.
Indian Creek High School launched its football program in 1970, and not long after that, Rob Ray began a three-year stint playing quarterback for the Braves’ teams. It was on that same gridiron, a generation later, that Rob’s sons, Justin and Kyle, would play football for the Braves as well.
After
high school, Rob played wide receiver at Franklin College, where his
girlfriend, Karen Ford, two years behind him at Indian Creek, would come to see
him play.
Before long, Rob took a job with the accounting firm Woodbury & Co. in Franklin, the seat of Johnson County. Franklin is a half-hour’s drive south of Indianapolis on I-65, but it was much closer than Indianapolis to the couple’s home in rural western Johnson County.
The Rays' family expanded to include daughter Leslie, born
in March 1983, then sons Justin and Kyle, in June 1986 and February 1989, respectively.
Justin recalled that when he and Kyle were very young, his mother dressed the
brothers in like clothing, fooling some people into thinking they were twins.
Karen said Rob shared his sports knowledge with all his children, and the two parents gave them strong support in their athletic and other life endeavors.
Leslie would join her parents attending her brothers’ baseball, basketball and football games later on. And while the boys competed in those games, Leslie ran off and played nearby with friends, which she felt was just as much fun as whatever thrills her brothers were enjoying in their athletic pursuits.
“Dad was always in the pool, and our friends would always be hanging onto him,” she said. Her mother, Karen, confirmed: “He was a kid magnet!”
Leslie went on to say that her father was always a generous person, something that became evident when she and her brothers’ friends joined the Rays on various fun outings.
“A friend of mine freshman year would talk about ‘The Bank of Rob,’ ” Leslie said. “He’d pay for everybody.”
Her brothers joined in when she and her friends wanted to play Boxcar Children, an activity that involved re-enacting or improvising their own versions of stories from the pages of the children’s book series of the same name by author Gertrude Chandler Warner.
The books follow the adventures of four orphaned children who make a home in an abandoned boxcar in the forest, eventually meeting up with a kind and wealthy grandfather. They don’t perceive him as kind at first, though; it takes a while for them to warm to him. The grandfather eventually invites the children to live with him, and he has the boxcar moved into the backyard of his home so the youngsters can use it as a playhouse.
“My brothers were not big readers,” Leslie said. “But they would come along with us when we played Boxcar Children. … Or maybe we made them,” she added with a chuckle.
Bantam is a program that encompasses independent leagues in which youths learn about the sport, strive to improve skills and compete in games.
Bantam’s youth-oriented development goal is similar to that of Pop Warner football, the program in which Eric Watt participated in northwest Indiana at about the same time.
Karen said other parents noticed Rob’s skillful teaching manner with youths in Bantam football. After his sons grew out of competition in that organization and started playing on school teams, some of those parents approached Rob and asked him to continue coaching Bantam teams. For a while, Karen said, Rob agreed “to come out of retirement” and do so.
Leslie attended grade and middle schools and the first year of high school in the Franklin Community School district, within whose boundaries their western Johnson County home was located. In summer 1998, between her freshman and sophomore years, she said, the family moved to a home along Lamb Lake southwest of Trafalgar.
The move put the Ray family in the Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson United School Corp., where Rob and Karen had attended school. For Leslie, that meant attending Indian Creek High School, beginning with her sophomore year. Her brothers would follow her there.
In her freshman year at Franklin Community High School, which had an enrollment slightly above 1,000 students,1 Leslie did not participate in interscholastic sports because she said she felt intimidated by the school’s relatively large student population.
At the smaller Indian Creek High School, whose enrollment was about half that of Franklin’s at the time, Leslie felt more at ease, so she tried out for the swim team and, the following year, the golf team, making both.
On the swim team, she helped set the school record in the 200-meter team medley, competing in the event’s butterfly leg. She noted that the record didn’t last long after she graduated.
When the boys reached high school, they played football and basketball, just like their father. Justin also competed on the boys golf team.
As much as the Ray boys learned from their school coaches once they began playing interscholastic sports in Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson schools, Karen said, “Rob was the best coach for the boys.”
Rob could be stern with his sons when he had to, Karen said. One time when Rob was coaching middle school ball, Kyle smart-mouthed his father. Rob told his son to run a lap as punishment, and Kyle refused. “Rob told Kyle, ‘Not only are you going to run that lap, but you’re also going to listen’.” Kyle ran the lap. And, he listened. In the family photo above, that’s Kyle (#23) running with the ball in a Bantam game.
Rob also coached Justin’s freshman high school basketball team and often would participate in the thick of the team’s scrimmages at practices. Kyle would come over to his brother’s practices after finishing his own at middle school and join the freshman scrimmages.
Kyle’s skills already were good enough that sometimes it seemed as if he were part of his older brother’s class, Justin said. Kyle would even hang out with Justin and his friends on occasion, and Justin, in turn, would hang out with Kyle and his friends.
Justin was a few inches shorter than his younger brother and was not as naturally strong as Kyle, but Justin worked hard to be his best, his mother said. Kyle occasionally was very intense – “he wanted to win, just like his father” – but she said there also were times when he didn’t want to put in the work.
“Kyle was naturally athletic and gifted, but he … rested on his laurels,” Karen said. “Rob had to push him more (than Justin),” and years later, Kyle credited his dad for nudging him to work harder.
Asked what comes to mind when people mention or ask about his father, Justin didn’t hesitate. “His smile and his laugh,” he said. The laugh was so loud, “you could hear it a mile away. It gets you laughing, too, it was that infectious.”Justin also pointed to Rob’s involvement in his children's sports. “He never pushed us into anything, and he always told us that if we try something, you should try to finish it first before going on to something else.”
He and Leslie recalled how their father would occasionally take the three children – or sometimes just Justin and Kyle – to Indian Springs Golf Course, a former nine-hole course in Johnson County that is now closed.
The owner, a client of the accounting firm where Rob worked, would let the Rays use a golf cart to drive to a nearby woods – Leslie remembers it being near the first hole – where the youths entered the wooded area and searched for lost and forgotten golf balls. They took them home and cleaned them.
“It was just a thing where Dad wanted to do something with us kids,” Justin said.
Leslie treasures those trips because the kids got to roam and explore the woods, perhaps conjuring adventures similar to those experienced by the Boxcar Children in the books she enjoyed reading or the playful re-enactments she and her friends indulged after reading the stories.
Justin and Kyle didn’t always need their father around to enjoy sports and games outdoors. Kyle spent hours throwing a football with classmate Caleb Raley. The boys' friendship spanned those early years – Bantam football and playing together on teams in middle and high schools. Raley would end up as a wide receiver on the Indian Creek High School varsity football team, catching many Matt Rogers and Kyle Ray passes for the Braves. He also would play on the defensive line.
Caleb recalled that he and Kyle first met at Fair Haven Christian Church in Trafalgar and its various church-related activities. The friendship grew to where they would get together often at the Ray residence, where Caleb and Kyle tossed the football back and forth in the front yard for what seemed like days upon end, often just to kill time. And because they both enjoyed it.
Kyle figures that he was not more than 7 years old when he met Stewart “Red” Faught, the legendary and longtime Franklin College head football coach who was at the helm in the years Kyle’s father played at the school.
Kyle was so young when he met Faught that he doesn’t remember much about the encounter, other than that it occurred outside a restaurant in downtown Franklin and that his father handled the introductions. In the family photo at left, Kyle is shown with his father while on vacation.
By
the time Kyle and Caleb were in seventh grade, the Rays were living along Lamb
Lake, and a third person joined the two boys in their various activities,
pursuits and endeavors.
Kolby Harrell and his family, including mother, Karen; stepfather, Rudy; and older brother, Alex, had moved to rural southern Johnson County from the urban Eastside of Indianapolis. The Harrells found a house along the same lake, and Kyle, Caleb and Kolby became fast friends.
Kolby said that the move from a big-city like Indianapolis to a small community like Trafalgar required an adjustment for him.
One experience that jumped to mind as being different for him was how the whole high school football team would take a knee in the end zone before each game to recite the Lord’s Prayer together. “It struck some people as odd,” he said, “but that was a small-town thing, I guess.”
Many Trafalgar residents traveled northeast to Franklin to do “big-town” stuff like shopping or seeing a movie in a theater, Kolby said. Franklin had a distinguished destination to enjoy motion pictures on the big screen. The historic Artcraft, built in 1922 as a silent movie theater and Vaudeville house, is still standing and in operation. In 2022, the Artcraft observed its centennial year in operation. Its website proclaims the Artcraft as one of “the most intact Art Deco movie houses in central Indiana” and is listed on the Indiana State Register of Historic Places.
Trafalgar, Kolby noted, has one stoplight, the one at 135 and 252. “Everybody knows everybody. It was difficult for me at first when I came here. … It was strange how often that teachers knew a certain kid’s parents. I came to appreciate it after a while.”
Like Caleb, Kolby stayed at the Rays’ home overnight as often as three times a week. When it came to basketball, the boys sometimes would get the keys to the Intermediate school gym from Kyle’s mother, who worked there as a secretary from about 2000-05, and play pickup basketball games.
Or if they didn’t want to make that trek, they set up a Little Tikes basketball set on the Rays’ dining room table, cranked it up as high as it could go, and played one-on-one against each other. They “branded” those indoor games as LTL – for Little Tikes League.
“We had to brand everything,” Kolby said with a chuckle, quickly identifying Kyle as the individual in the trio who felt a need to “brand” things.
As for football, the boys’ indulgences eventually graduated from just tossing the ball around to incorporating the lake into their fun. The youths devised a game that Kyle branded “Dock Ball,” because it involved utilizing a three-sided dock that was used to define the borders of a swimming area near the shoreline.
Dock Ball, as the boys devised it, blends the use of a football with the scoring system of baseball. One individual stands on the shore and throws the ball to someone standing on a dock portion parallel to the shore – usually about 20-30 yards away. Passes were supposed to be challenging enough that receivers might sometimes have to jump into the water to make the catch. In the accompanying Ray family photo, Kyle (right) stands with Harrell brothers Kolby (left) and Alex on the beach in front of the docks where Dock Ball was played.
“We’d throw passes for hours at a time,” Kolby said. “When I think about Kyle as a quarterback, part of my thinking is how good he got at Dock Ball. He would throw it hard and high and got really good at it.”
A few years down the road, Kyle invited college roommate and football teammate Coty Bragdon to his home at Lamb Lake. During that visit, Kyle introduced Bragdon to Kolby – and to Dock Ball.
Eight to 10 years after the Ray family had moved away from Lamb Lake, which occurred about a year after Kyle graduated from college, Justin Ray learned just how enduring the game was.
“Some mom I ran into – I can’t remember who it was – was talking about how her kids are playing and loving this Dock Ball game. I said ‘Dock Ball? We invented Dock Ball!’ I think her kids must have been watching us play it” while the Ray family still lived along the lake.
Because the Rays’ home was close to the entrance of the Lamb Lake development, when Kolby got old enough to drive and returned home from running an errand, he could tell with near certainty if Kyle were in his house or out on the lake just by looking at the Ray family’s boat slip. If the boat were missing, he knew Kyle was out on the water. And if Kyle were on the water, more often than not Kolby would go to the lake and join his friend.
Kolby said the lake and the water were a welcome relief – and an outlet to recuperate – for the three friends and occasionally some of their teammates after late-summer, two-a-day football practices in high school.
Kolby has nothing but fond memories of Rob Ray, who he described as “a very even-tempered, kind man. I saw him as a father figure myself. He was not hard on the boys (Kyle and Justin). I remember wishing I had a father like him. … ”
Kolby’s parents had divorced and each remarried by the time he moved to Lamb Lake from Indianapolis, according to Kyle. In addition, Kolby’s father, John, and his second wife and family moved from Indiana to the South, Kyle said, so John wasn’t around a lot for his sons in those critical rearing years.
“I only met John a handful of times. I’ve known Kolby for about 20 years, and I met John maybe … hmmm … two or three times,” Kyle said.
Kyle remembers a time when Alex Harrell was playing in a freshman basketball game at Indian Creek High School and heard that his father was going to come watch him play.
“Alex could not help but keep looking in the stands,” trying to find his father, Kyle said. “John was late. Alex just wanted his dad to watch him. He wanted that relationship with his dad."
Rob and Karen Ray were sensitive to the Harrell boys’ situation and welcomed Alex and Kolby into their home and on their own family trips, often picking up tabs just like Leslie remembers Rob doing for her friends.
Rob didn’t get angry even when he and Karen learned that Kyle, Caleb and Kolby had taken mattresses off the Rays’ beds and tossed them onto the front yard so they could have padding to break falls during tackling drills they’d run from time to time. Usually, the boys did this when Kyle’s parents weren’t around, but they always returned the mattresses and brushed off any dirt or debris, Kolby said.
The boys would hear about it, though, if the Ray parents came home to find that the boys had climbed out the window of Kyle’s upstairs room so they could sit on the house’s roof to hang out.
Kyle said that during his eighth-grade year (2002-03), fan frenzy over the Indian Creek High School football team reached the highest level he had ever seen.
It was Mike Gillin’s second year as head coach, and it was the senior season of the coach’s son and team’s starting quarterback, Casey Gillin. The Braves won their first 12 games and, more importantly, soundly defeated postseason nemesis Brownstown Central, 50-6, to win a sectional for the first time in what seemed like a decade.
“I remember the whole town, it seemed, showed up for the pep rally,” Kyle said. “I thought, Indian Creek football is here. We beat Brownstown Central!” Unfortunately, Indian Creek would lose the regional round game against Southridge, 39-20, the following week.
Kolby estimated that in eighth grade he stood 5-foot-5 and weighed 120 pounds “on a good day,” measurements that he felt were too small for football. Plus, he said his mother was not yet in favor of him playing such a physical sport. So he didn’t try out for the eighth-grade team. Nevertheless, the team’s head coach, Rob Ray, recruited Kolby to serve as team manager and statistician, and Kolby accepted.
Kyle recalled a dramatic, personal moment in an eighth-grade game against rival Brown County:
The score was 14-14 with the clock winding down at the end of the game and Indian Creek on offense. With the ball near the 25-yard line of Brown County, and enough time left for one play, Kyle went back to pass. The defensive pressure was on him quickly, so he moved out of the pocket, broke a tackle and decided to make a run for it, cutting across the field. He said he scored the winning touchdown as time expired.
“That was probably the most excited and pumped I’ve ever been in a game. It was the last play.”
Kolby’s physical stature did not improve significantly once he entered high school or even in the years thereafter through his senior year, but he did go out for and make the football team his high school freshman year. He worked hard at practices and on scout teams, and he attended summer 7-on-7 competitions, such as the one depicted in the Ray family photo below showing Kyle preparing to pass and head football coach Mike Gillin on the left, observing.
The 7-on-7s would be mostly local, Kolby said, although he remembers the team did compete in 7-on-7 competitions at Butler University and at the Mellencamp practice field on the campus of Indiana University.
7-on-7s, Kolby observed, “were a very backyard type of football” in which the defense touches or tags, instead of tackles, as a way to end a play. Players might wear helmets, he said, but they did not wear protective pads or other gear.
During down time at the Butler 7-on-7s, Kolby recalled, Kyle joined a side competition in which quarterbacks tried to throw footballs into a trash can from about 20 yards away. “He was beating everybody,” Kolby said.
At one point around this time, one of the three boys stumbled upon an old but still operable video camera in the Ray family’s garage. The youths hatched an idea to create and perform amusing sketches and use the camera to record them. The sketches would involve such things as acting out a fake hunting show, or doing a send-up on the Baywatch television show (made convenient by the fact that Kyle and Kolby lived at Lake Lamb).
And they did comical spins of a nature show. An example of this materialized one day when Kyle spotted a spider, Kolby said. As soon as they got the camera rolling, Kyle was waxing humorous every which way about the spider, the spider species and/or anything else related to spiders that came to mind.
So taken were the boys by their productions that they branded their creative collective with a catchy name – 2KC (for the two of them whose first names began with the letter “K” plus the “C” in Caleb). The amusing video recordings continued well into the friends’ years at Indian Creek High School, where the sketches were a huge hit with students.
“People ate it up. They loved them,” Kolby said of the comedy vignettes. Kolby credited Kyle for the videos’ popularity because he had so many ideas, and he possessed the talent and wit to compose a hilarious narrative on the spur of the moment.
When the three friends were sophomores, Kolby said, many seniors pleaded with 2KC to create sketches for them. So the trio held “auditions” for seniors to qualify for a sketch. 2KC made the seniors “do some embarrassing things” in the auditions, and for the most part, the seniors did what they were asked, Kolby said.
“Kyle was always a fun guy, talkative, the life of a party,” Kolby said. “He was kind of a character. He could think on his feet. You could roll the camera, and he would talk and be funny. … He could get people to follow him” without even trying. “And I don’t mean that in a bad way.” People simply gravitated to his genuineness and charisma, attributes he picked up from his father.
“We could have been famous on TikTok” if the popular contemporary entertainment app had been available on smart phones back then, Kyle said.
Kolby was the “technician” of the sketch-making trio, taking care of any needed editing or last-minute polishing, Kyle said. But Caleb felt that most of the videos they recorded didn’t require much work afterward. He said that what they shot usually was what viewers ended up seeing.
The trio also devised – and, remarkably, fetched considerable interest in and support for – a non-video promotion at school.
As Kolby explained it, the blandness of 2KC’s “the parking club” was somewhat akin to the “pet rock” novelty fad of the 1970s. For the parking club, 2KC designated a remote corner of the school lot as the club's parking site. Everyone who wanted to be in the club received a spiffy laminated parking club card as proof of membership. And as members, they had to park their vehicles in the designated remote corner of the school lot. It was key to the concept’s ridiculousness.
In the spirit of “if you build it, people will come,”2 students indeed came, wanting to be club members. And yes, according to Kolby, club members dutifully parked their vehicles there. Again, club members willingly parked in the farthest point possible from the school entrance. Just because they were members of the club.
On still another occasion, Kolby said, the three friends went to a Goodwill store, where each of them found and bought a three-piece suit and then wore the suits to school. Just because.
Kolby also recalled that for a freshman history class, each student was required to either write about or create something related to food or culture … or build to scale a replica of a renowned work of architecture. Kyle chose the latter.
Some of the other students who also elected to build a replica of a renowned structure chose such things as the Pyramids in Egypt or the Great Wall of China. Kolby said Kyle built a model of “The Big House,” a popular reference to the University of Michigan football stadium.
So in lock step were the three boys that they often were invited to and attended each other’s family get-togethers. Kyle says it was at one such get-together that he met Claire Freeman, his future wife. Claire and Kolby’s mothers are sisters.
Claire, however, says that she and Kyle first met at an Indian Creek football game when she was in sixth grade and Kyle was in eighth, which would have been 2002, “but I bet he’d say he doesn’t remember that. I was a bit smitten with the older guy.”
She said the family get-together Kyle remembers occurred afterward on a Memorial Day weekend at her home in Fishers. She recalled that attendees played basketball and volleyball, “and we just spent time hanging out outside. From my perspective, I was in eighth grade, and he was a sophomore in high school, and I was (still) smitten by an older guy.”
The feeling was mutual, though, because Kyle said he remembers telling himself at that get-together that he hoped to marry Claire someday.
As good as the aforementioned 2002 Indian Creek High School football team was, the version two years later wasn’t too far off. Kyle’s older brother, Justin, a senior in 2004, and Kyle, then a sophomore, started in the team’s defensive backfield, and Matt Rogers was its quarterback. Indian Creek won every game from the beginning of the season until postseason sectionals, when it ran into Brownstown Central and lost, 26-13.
“That loss to Brownstown was probably the hardest loss for me,” said Kyle, who also served as the backup quarterback.
Football fortunes at Indian Creek in the new millennium contrasted with those from years earlier. For most of the 25-year period from 1976, the year Rob Ray graduated from Indian Creek High School, until 2001, the school’s football team experienced a protracted lack of success – just six winning seasons, and none better than 7-3 (in 1982 and ’84).
The tide turned in 2001 when the Gillins – coach Mike and quarterback Casey – arrived in Trafalgar.
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Footnotes:
2 - Today, Franklin Community High School’s enrollment is about 1,560 students, while Indian Creek High School’s enrollment, at 585 students, has remained pretty constant since the Ray siblings were there.
3 - An oft-quoted line uttered by the mysterious “voice” in the 1989 motion picture Field of Dreams.
Tomorrow in Chapter 5: Where Legends Played
Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons":
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