Mike
Gillin (shown at right in a photo he provided) introduced the spread offense to his Class 2A Indian Creek High School football team
when he hired on as head coach in 2001. Local residents affectionately referred
to the offense as “pass happy.” (In just a few short years, the spread – or “pass
happy” offense – also would be introduced at South Newton High School, 135
miles north of Trafalgar.)Spread offenses at the time were few and far between in high school football. College coach Urban Meyer had been using them at his stops at Bowling Green, Utah and Florida and would do so again at Ohio State in 2012, and it was at the turn of the millennium that high school coaches who liked what Meyer was doing decided to try and implement that approach in their high school playbooks.
And the true progenitor of the spread might well be Stewart “Red” Faught, Franklin (Ind.) College’s longtime head coach (1957-1988). His offensive playbooks tilted heavily in favor of the passing game for years.
The “spread” got its name because of its use of three, four and sometimes even five pass receivers who spread out from core offensive blockers on the line of scrimmage. By using that scheme, “spread” also is what the offense wants to do to the defense; the spread forces defenses to pull people (usually linebackers) away from the area of the offense's center and quarterback to cover the extra receivers. And if defenses don’t do that, they risk leaving a receiver open, something quarterbacks seek to exploit, hopefully for long-yardage gains.
Some sons might have difficulty playing a sport coached by their father, but not Casey Gillin, who today still holds or ranks high among Indian Creek’s career, single-season and single-game passing records. Casey’s astounding 60 touchdown passes in 2002 remain a single-season record for Indiana high schools, and his 8,806 career passing yards rank 14th all-time among state high school players.
And after never having enjoyed a season with double-digit victories in the preceding three decades, the Indian Creek High School Braves went 10-1 and 12-1 with Casey at quarterback in 2001 and ’02.
After graduating from Indian Creek, Casey enjoyed three outstanding seasons quarterbacking teams at the University of Indianapolis, better known today as UIndy, a NCAA Division II school in adjacent Marion County, directly north of Johnson County.
In December 2021, several years after Mike and Casey had departed Trafalgar to pursue other interests, Casey sparked hope for a new wave of success at Indian Creek when he returned to his high school alma mater to take over as head coach.
In 2022, his first season at the helm, the Braves finished 7-4; the team’s record in 2023 was 8-4. But in January 2024, Casey announced he planned to leave Indian Creek to join his father, head coach at Mooresville (Ind.) High School, for the 2024 season to serve as offensive coordinator.
Good friends Kyle Ray, Caleb Raley and Kolby Harrell went out for the Indian Creek High School football team in 2003, their freshman year. All three played primarily on the junior varsity that first year.
Caleb played defensive end and wide receiver on the varsity squad from sophomore year thereafter. He said the defensive end position fell into place because he was tall (6-foot-3) and because, by the time he was a senior, he weighed 225 pounds.
Kolby, still slight of stature, made the varsity his sophomore year, but saw no live-action playing time that year or the year after. But he was not deterred; he enjoyed the team camaraderie and practiced diligently with special teams and defensive cornerbacks.
Meanwhile,
Kyle played full time in the defensive backfield sophomore and junior years. He
had wanted to start at quarterback and lead the offense, but at the time,
another stellar quarterback, southpaw Matt Rogers, who succeeded Casey Gillin,
was starting ahead of him.
Kyle spent his sophomore and junior years as Rogers’ backup on the offensive depth chart. Kyle (#10) and older brother Justin (#5) are shown above in a family photo from the 2004 high school football season at Indian Creek.
Mike and Casey Gillin and Matt Rogers weren’t the only legends Kyle and Justin Ray were following at Indian Creek. The brothers also were legacies of Rob Ray, their father.
When Rob played at Indian Creek, the Braves compiled 6-4 seasons his sophomore and junior years. The Trafalgar community got really excited during his senior year, 1975, when Rob – then known as Robbie – directed head coach Tom Scott’s run-dominant wishbone offense to near-perfection. The Braves went undefeated through the regular season and came one game short of playing for a state championship.
In 1975, the Indiana High School Athletic Association was in only its third year of class-division postseason football, and only four teams qualified for the postseason in each of three classes. (As yet, there were no sectionals or regionals.)
Hence, there was a maximum of just two games a team could possibly play in the postseason, so the “playoffs” for a championship entailed what amounted to a semifinal and a final.
Had Indian Creek beaten Lawrenceburg in what constituted the Class A tournament’s semifinal game, the Braves not only would have played for the championship the following week against Wes-Del, but they also would have hosted that game. Instead, Lawrenceburg hosted the final, beating Wes-Del, 28-14.
Robbie Ray ranked third in Johnson County in total rushing yardage in 1975 — 789 yards on 96 carries; his average of 8 yards per carry was best among the top 11 rushers in the county. He ranked third in the county in passing yardage (640) and was tied for first in touchdown passes (12), according to statistics published that year in the Johnson County Daily Journal.
When the then-United Press International wire service announced its all-state team at the end of the 1975 season, Robbie Ray was included as an honorable mention.
After graduating third in his high school class in 1976, Robbie went on to play wide receiver for Red Faught at Franklin College, which is a short drive northeast of Trafalgar.
In 1976, Faught was in his 20th season as the school’s head coach, and he would go on to coach for 12 more seasons, compiling a record of 159-140-6 1 at Franklin when he stepped down following the 1988 season, making him the winningest football coach in Franklin College history. Faught was inducted into the Indiana Football Hall of Fame on June 27, 1981, seven years before he stepped down.
In 1979, Robbie’s senior year at Franklin College, the Grizzlies finished 6-4 and in second place in the Heartland Collegiate Conference. Robbie was named second team NAIA All-America and was voted the Grizzlies’ and HCC’s Most Valuable Player.
Rob graduated Franklin College cum laude, earning a bachelor’s degree in business and accounting. At graduation, he was honored as the president of the Delta Mu Delta business honorary, was named to the Alpha Scholastic Honorary and was presented the Wall Street Journal Award for his outstanding performance in the classroom.
Kolby Harrell’s recollection of Rob Ray’s good personality agrees with the recollection of at least one person at Woodbury & Co. in Franklin, which today goes by the name Woodbury Group. The accounting firm is where Rob spent the majority of his working career.
“I know a lot of accountants, and Rob was not like a lot of accountants,” said Max Woodbury III, a teammate of Kyle Ray at both Indian Creek High School and Franklin College.Rob and Max III’s years at the accounting firm didn’t overlap much, but Max was familiar enough with Rob to say that Rob “had a good personality and didn't mind speaking to clients. People liked him, and to this day, some of my old clients bring him up somehow in our conversations.
“Most accountants just want to sit behind the computer and prepare tax returns, but Rob was willing to explain and answer questions … a lot like my dad, who is the same way. I try to be the same while I am running the business currently.”
As for teammate Kyle Ray, Max said: “I remember Kyle as a humble and athletic quarterback. Seemed to me he was always happy and smiling, which helped me be a better person.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Justin Ray, Rob’s older son, got his 15 minutes of fame early in 2004 in his junior year on Indian Creek’s basketball team, although, as it turned out, it entailed more than just 15 minutes.
Late in the regular season, some parents in the Indian Creek High School community – including those who had boys on the basketball team – were at the apex of a protracted disenchantment with the way they felt Indian Creek boys basketball coach Larry Angle favored his son, senior J.R. Angle, over and beyond what other players and the parents felt was normal.
They had complained about this as far back as when Larry Angle first started coaching at the school three years previously.
The parents heard players say the coach repeatedly instructed them to pass the ball to J.R., a prolific scorer who eventually obtained a scholarship to play the sport collegiately at the University of Iowa.2
Two years into Larry Angle’s term as coach, according to Kyle Ray, the athletic director was hearing the complaints, too, and investigated. He found the complaints to be valid and recommended to the School Board that coach Angle be removed, Kyle said. But the School Board declined to do so.
So here it was, two years later, in February 2004, and the issue was still hanging over the boys basketball program. Even though J.R.'s high school career was winding down, a few parents decided that unusual – and unorthodox – action was required, action that would eventually make news headlines throughout Indiana and beyond.
According to news reports at the time, a group of parents approached Justin Ray one day and offered him money to execute what could best be described as a “purpose prank” during the last home game of the season, which coincided with the team’s annual Senior Night.
The purpose of the prank – or stunt – was to expose the coach’s longtime favoritism in a public way, in front of witnesses, i.e., the crowd at a home game. The parents asked Justin to pass the ball to J.R., exactly per the coach’s oft-repeated instruction, but not while the two players were on the court together. They wanted Justin to be on the court during live play and J.R. to be sitting on the bench after having been removed for a substitute.
For a period before the Senior Night game, Justin had talked to Kyle about the ongoing issue and said he was contemplating doing something publicly to stand up for himself and the other players on the team, Kyle said.
It was unclear whether the angry parents had approached Justin about doing the stunt before or after Justin first confided in Kyle. But Kyle said he knew before Senior Night that his brother was considering doing something demonstrative – and unusual – that evening.
On Senior Night – J.R. was the only senior on the team that season – the Braves were playing Johnson County foe Greenwood. Late in the fourth quarter, Justin and Kyle were sitting on the bench together when coach Angle told Justin to go into the game for J.R. When that happened, Kyle said, he thought to himself: “Oh man, it’s going to happen. Is it going to happen now?”
He didn’t have to wait long to get an answer. It did, indeed, happen. Kyle said he saw his brother make the pass to J.R., now sitting on the bench, and Kyle said he saw J.R. catch the ball. But Kyle said his eyes didn’t linger on J.R.; he was immediately drawn to look at the crowd because of how fans were reacting.
“The student section went nuts. Some of the parents cheered,” Kyle said.
Parents came up to Justin after the game and gave him $45 for his trouble. Justin no doubt had an inkling he’d get an earful from school officials about the stunt (and he did), but what he probably didn’t realize immediately was how his acceptance of $45 would make matters considerably worse for him.
At the time, an amateur athlete at any level of competition was not allowed to accept monetary compensation for anything that was part of or could be tied to amateur sport competitions such as high school basketball. This was well before the name, influence and likeness (NIL) compensation rule was adopted in college athletics.
In short order, Justin returned the money and apologized to coach Angle, to J.R. and to the school, according to Justin's mother, Karen Ray. But apologies would not make trouble associated with the acceptance of cash vanish immediately.
Kyle Ray fiercely defended Justin and his action, but he also defended J.R. Angle.
Justin didn’t pull the prank to shame J.R., Kyle emphasized. He did it to send a message to the school “that this was what we were trained to do – to pass the ball to J.R.”
And as for J.R., Kyle said: “J.R. was a victim just like everyone else. J.R. was a good guy. I imagine it was tough on him.”
Justin remained on the hot seat for several months afterward. Very soon after the game, he was suspended from the team. At first, the suspension was just for the rest of the season, which involved only a few games. But later, the Indiana High School Athletic Association – the regulatory authority of all high school sports in Indiana – announced that Justin would be suspended from participating in any interscholastic sports for his entire senior season, 2004-05.
Meanwhile, the School Board finally parted ways with coach Angle following that school year. It also decided not to renew the contracts of its athletics director and superintendent of schools.
Karen Ray said that at some point before the next school year, when the fury over the incident had long subsided, she and Justin sat down with IHSAA commissioner Blake Ress and negotiated a much less severe punishment for her son: Justin would be suspended for just his first four athletic games/meets in his senior year. Those all turned out to be golf meets, so Justin was able to play a full football and basketball schedule in his final year of high school.
Karen said she and husband Rob were aware of the community unrest with coach Angle’s alleged favoritism on the team at the time. “Justin had friends on the team who were not happy,” she said.
But she said she and Rob were not aware that parents had approached Justin to do the “purpose prank” or to offer their son cash compensation to do it. “If we had been (aware), we would have stopped it,” she said. The months from February 2004 until the fall “were one of the worst times of my life,” she said.
In the weeks after the incident, Rob and Karen tried to help the community heal from the incident by writing an impassioned letter, via the Letters to the Editor forum in the Johnson County Daily Journal. Published in the newspaper’s editions of March 10, 2004, the letter urged the community to move on.
“Justin has been miserable, along with other students, teammates and, yes, even adults,” they wrote. It was unfortunate, they continued, that Karen and Rob did not know about the plans ahead of time so they could stop the prank and meet with the adults who thought it was a good idea to give Justin money for doing what he did.
“Yes,
it was in poor judgment, and for that they are remorseful and have expressed
their sorrow to our family. But in our own son’s words, ‘Parents did not
influence me.’ He has been truthful and forthright from the beginning. Yes,
kids do make mistakes, and we should be there to help them learn from them.”
“Now to the important issue. This community needs to come together to heal and forgive. There has been too much hurt on both sides of this issue. We want to be part of the solution, not the problem.”
In his interview for this story in 2022 – 18 years after the incident – Justin Ray declined to discuss details of the prank other than to say, “When you’re young, you make decisions, and you have to live with them.”
An interesting twist of fate occurred a decade or so later: The Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson United School Corp. hired Justin Ray as athletics director, serving first at Indian Creek Middle School and later at the high school.
And while Justin declined to discuss the prank at length, he did say that a man who officiated that 2004 basketball game between Indian Creek and Greenwood was assigned to work a game at Indian Creek High School in 2014, when Justin was athletics director. Justin said he and the referee crossed paths that evening, neither recognizing the other at first.
The two began talking, and the referee told Justin that the last time he had worked a game at the school was the night an Indian Creek player threw a pass to a teammate sitting on the bench near the end of the game. Justin said he turned to the referee and said, “Would you believe that the guy who threw that pass is standing in front of you?”
After
serving in those director of athletics jobs for several years, Justin left the
school district in April 2017 to be a supervisor of grounds at Whiteland High
School in the Clark-Pleasant Community School Corp., which is in northeastern
Johnson County, Ind. Justin has since left
When not working, Justin today serves as associate online campus director for Emmanuel Church in Johnson County.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
With Matt Rogers at quarterback in 2003, ’04 and ’05, Indian Creek’s football teams finished with records of 9-3, 10-1 and 7-4. Rogers led Indian Creek to undefeated Mid-Indiana Football Conference championships in 2004 and ’05, but the Braves lost in the postseason sectionals both years to Brownstown Central (as well as in 2003, when South Decatur won the league title). After graduating high school, Rogers had a successful career quarterbacking at Marian University, an NAIA member school in Indianapolis.
Coach Mike Gillin said Rogers rarely needed to be taken out of games at Indian Creek. Usually, the only times the starting quarterback came out were when the Braves held a significant lead and/or victory was assured, so backup QB Kyle Ray didn’t see a lot of action on offense. Ray did start on defense both years and had ambitions in his senior year to step into Rogers’ shoes.
There were two games in 2004 when Ray saw more than mop-up action as quarterback. On a scramble shortly before halftime in the Braves’ Sept. 3 game against Eastern Hancock, a Royals defender hit Rogers on the right, non-throwing forearm, which according to the Daily Journal game story, numbed the limb from wrist to shoulder.
Gillin
pulled Rogers out of the 7-7 game at the start of the third quarter, and Kyle Ray
entered in his place. The Braves rode the back of running back Curtis Pfaehler,
who gained 40 yards on his first four carries of the first drive with Ray
behind center. The drive ended when Ray tossed an 8-yard scoring pass to
Jeremiah Tworek.
Three weeks later, Rogers sat out the whole game against Milan while recovering from minor arthroscopic knee surgery, and Kyle took over. Again, the Braves turned to Pfaehler to carry the offense, and he responded, gaining 172 yards on 14 carries and scoring five of Indian Creek’s eight total rushing touchdowns.
Ray scored one of those rushing TDs himself – a 46-yarder in the second quarter. He also completed 10 of 22 passes for 182 yards. One of those completions was a 23-yarder to his brother, Justin, who normally played defensive exclusively. Coach Gillin had sent Justin into the game on offense to run a corner route from the left wideout position.
Coach Mike Gillin says he remembers Kyle “as one of the finest individuals I’ve been around” and quickly attributed that characterization to the athlete’s wholesomeness and strong family upbringing, alluding to Rob and Karen Ray.
“He was easy to coach all the way through. … We’ve kept in touch over the years, and I see him every once in a while. He brings back a lot of memories …”
Asked
about his play as a strong safety on defense as a sophomore and junior, Kyle
joked self-deprecatingly that he wasn’t fast enough to be a defensive
cornerback, whose job usually is to stick close to wide receivers. Doing
that requires a good amount of speed.
Safeties are usually responsible for either doubling coverage on a particularly good receiver, roaming the deep portion of the field when pass plays are expected on long-yardage downs or responding to wherever defensive support is needed on routine plays, which occasionally can involve safety blitzes.
Gillin credited Kyle for being analytical in attacking defenses when he did play quarterback. The coach had no doubt that Ray’s two years on defense – and knowing how to “read,” or understand, those defenses – helped Ray succeed in leading the Braves’ offense when he indeed became the starting quarterback in 2006.
Gillin remembers Ray’s physique as “wiry” when he first came out for the team as a freshman. But he said Kyle had matured physically and was over 6-feet tall (he was 6-2 when he started college) by the time he played his last two years. Justin Ray said his younger brother was always a solid tackler.
“He was very physical even as a sophomore,” Justin said, adding that his brother's good tackling ability was why coach Gillin had Kyle start as a sophomore in the Braves’ sectional game against Union County in 2004, a game the Braves won, 42-8.
Justin then chuckled and said, “He (Kyle) probably didn’t tell you this, but he did give up the (opponents’) only touchdown of the game!” He alluded to how Union County wide receiver Jordan Hunter got behind the Indian Creek secondary and hauled in a pass from Caleb Hackney for a 55-yard touchdown on Union County’s opening possession of the third quarter.
Justin neglected to mention that Kyle came into the Union County game briefly on offense later in the third quarter to spell starting quarterback Matt Rogers, who had come out with muscle spasms following a hard hit. Kyle promptly threw a 9-yard touchdown pass to Jake Scott, whose interception moments earlier had given the Braves the ball and a short field.
In fairness, Justin also didn’t mention that in the first half, Justin himself intercepted a Hackney pass, one of four Indian Creek interceptions on the night.
By the end of the 2005 season, their junior years of football, Kyle’s friend and teammate, Kolby Harrell, had yet to appear in a game for the Braves. At a team cookout at Coach Gillin’s home in summer 2006 before the start of Kyle, Caleb and Kolby's senior year, the coach gathered players together to discuss goals for the upcoming season.
Gillin
asked each player to share their personal goals.
Kyle said Kolby told everyone that regardless of whether he ever played in a game, his goal was to be a good teammate and to do anything the team needed to win, a remark that fetched high praise from the coach.
Kyle wasn't the only player on the team aware that his good friend hadn’t gotten into a game to see live action yet.
“Coach Gillin had a lot of respect for Kolby,” Kyle said, offering the possible theory that Gillin didn’t put Harrell on the field when the Braves had huge leads in the last quarter because Gillin felt he needed to protect Kolby, who was still physically slight at the time.
“Swimming was Kolby’s sport,” Kyle said (more on Kolby's swimming exploits in the Epilogue, which will follow the final chapter). “He played football for the sport and for the fun of it. He got the best enjoyment from just hanging out with all the guys.”
* * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
During Kyle's high school years, his parents and those of girlfriend Claire Freeman were supporting their children’s interest in dating each other, even though the two families lived some 50 miles apart. The Rays’ home along Lamb Lake in southern Johnson County, was 32 miles south of Indianapolis. Claire’s home was in Fishers, a Hamilton County suburb about 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis.
Claire remembers that she, Kyle and their parents would occasionally meet on the Southside of Indianapolis for dinner. Their favorite places there were Cracker Barrel, Texas Roadhouse and the former Jonathan Byrd Cafeteria, which was just south of Indianapolis in the northern Johnson County suburb of Greenwood. “Our families were great together. Very supportive,” she said.
Claire played basketball for a highly successful program at Heritage Christian High School, in northeast Indianapolis.
The Eagles won Class 2A championships in the Indiana High School Athletic Association postseason tournament in each of her four years there – 2006, ’07, ’08 and ’09. (The Eagles also had been state runner-up in 2005, the year before Claire entered high school.) In the state tournament championship game her senior year, she sank a field goal with 3 seconds left in overtime to seal the victory over Oak Hill, 60-58. She also was named that year’s tournament Most Valuable Player.
Claire was good enough on those teams to fetch college scholarship offers from such schools as Butler University in Indianapolis, Evansville (Ind.) University, Southern Illinois and Miami of Ohio. She ultimately chose Butler, largely because it was close to Kyle and both of their families, and she wanted them to be able to see her play without having to make a long, difficult commute.
And by Kyle’s senior year of high school, Claire was attending many of Kyle’s football and basketball games, and Kyle was going to many of Claire’s basketball games.
________________________________________________________________________________
Footnotes:1 - In 2018, there was much publicity about how Mike Leonard, then Franklin College's head football coach, was approaching, equaled and then passed Faught's supposed career wins record of 120 at Franklin. (Leonard would finish with 129 wins when he stepped down after the 2019 season.) Franklin College officials have since discovered that 120 was not Faught's wins total at Franklin and have acknowledged that the 2018 publicity was unwarranted because Faught's wins total was, and has always been, nearly 40 more than what media reports cited in 2018. The only known resource that claims Faught's career wins total at Franklin College is 120 is the Indiana Football Hall of Fame in its online member biography for Faught. While 120 was at, or near, Faught's wins total at the time Faught was inducted into the IFHOF in 1981, Faught coached seven more seasons after his induction, winning 40 more games, but the Hall never updated his biographical information to reflect the post-induction wins, losses and ties. As of Jan. 30, 2024, the IFHOF still showed Faught's career wins at Franklin as 120, even though in mid-2023 the author sent it the same indisputable evidence it provided the college to set the record straight. The author knows of at least two other IFHOF members, Bud Wright of Sheridan and Mike Gillin, now of Mooresville, whose coaching wins records in their respective IFHOF biographies are in error because they are not current. Wright was inducted in 2002 and Gillin in 2014, also before they retired. In fact, Wright and Gillin are still active in coaching as of January 2024.
2 - In four seasons at Iowa, 2004-09, J.R. Angle played in 62 games, starting four, and averaged 1.9 points, 1.1 rebounds and 0.4 assists per game. He was red-shirted in 2005-06. In his senior season at Indian Creek, he had averaged 27.3 points per game, ranking fourth in the state of Indiana. In the metro Indianapolis area, he was second only to the 36.2 ppg of Broad Ripple High School’s George Hill, who would go on to play college ball at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis followed by a 15-year pro career with NBA teams in San Antonio, Indiana, Utah, Sacramento, Cleveland, Oklahoma City and Milwaukee. Today, J.R. is an assistant basketball coach at Greenfield (Ind.) Central High School.
Tomorrow in Chapter 6: A Moonlight Graham Moment
Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons":
Chapter 2: Mastering the Spread
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