In October 1990, the string of Purichia (pronounced purr-REE-kah) quarterbacks was the subject of an article by Indianapolis News reporter Jimmie Angelopolous. The main story was accompanied by a sidebar identifying the various offspring in the portion of the family tree started by Angelo Purichia and Josephine Lombardi. Angelo was born of Romanian parents in what is now Thessoloniki in Greece and came to the United States in 1912.
Their sons Mike Sr., Bill, Carol, Nick, Joe and Steve were quarterbacks at Washington High School from 1949 to 1965. And another son, Spiro, played football at Washington but not at quarterback. Quarterbacks from those offspring include Joe’s son Jeff; Spiro’s son, Joe; Mike’s son, Vincent; and Vince’s older brother Mike Jr.’s son, Mike III, according to the article.
Vince, a southpaw, and his sons Nick and Jake did their quarterbacking for Cardinal Ritter High School in Indianapolis. Vince and the Raiders made it to the Indiana High School Athletic Association Class A state championship game his senior year in 1987. He threw for a then-title game record 263 yards, including a 61-yard third-quarter scoring pass to John Goebel, in a 23-20 loss to Rochester. The yardage of that scoring pass set another title game record at the time.
Vince also had one other touchdown pass in the game and, as the team’s place-kicker, he had a chance to send the game into overtime by converting a 41-yard field goal with 10 seconds remaining in regulation.
“I thought I hit it good,” Purichia told The Indianapolis Star of the kick after the game. “I heard the crowd yelling, and I looked up, but it was wide left.” He also missed an extra-point kick and two previous field goal attempts in the game. The Raiders finished the year with a win-loss record of 12-2.
Vince went on to play football at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Ind., earning a degree in physical education. Mike III followed Vince to Ritter and quarterbacked the Raiders his senior season in 1990, a year the team finished with a record of 4-5. Mike III also played defensive back and handled punting chores.
Cardinal Ritter High School is one of four geographically positioned Catholic deanery high schools in Indianapolis. The Catholic Church calls each of its affiliate church districts a “deanery,” and Ritter is the archdiocese’s west deanery high school in Indianapolis. The other deanery high schools in the capital city are Bishop Chatard (north), Scecina Memorial (east) and Roncalli (south).
Vince passed down his love of sports to all five of his children, and that enjoyment was frequently witnessed by anyone who walked or drove past his home, which was a short walking distance from the Ritter campus. On good-weather days, the Purichia children played sports and other games with friends in the neighborhood whenever they got a chance.
One such witness is Matt Hollowell, who taught and worked on the administrative staff of Ritter for 12 years and also coached freshman football there for three years, beginning in 2006.
“I come from a big family like the Purichias,” said Hollowell, the second of 11 children and a 1999 graduate of Roncalli, the archdiocese’s south deanery high school. “I’d drive by their home leaving work and see them out there playing. They’re a sports-loving family. I loved seeing that. … It brought a smile to my face. It would remind me of my family.”
Nick
Purichia, Vince’s oldest son, pictured in a family photo at left with younger brother, Jake, ages 10 and 4, respectively, was a fan of the NFL Denver Broncos as a youth, at
least through the years that quarterback John Elway played on the
team. Nick also became a fan of quarterback Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins.
Nick attended Ritter a generation after his dad and was a three-sport athlete, playing basketball and baseball in addition to football. Like his dad, he played quarterback and defensive back in football. Vince would serve as Ritter's offensive coordinator and assistant coach in charge of quarterbacks in those years. He also served a stint as head baseball coach and worked in the administrative offices as director of admissions around the same time.
Nick said he always felt that baseball was his best sport; he started and lettered in baseball all four years at Ritter. He pitched and played the field for the Raiders.
He
wore jersey number 13 in football and baseball, he said, because of Marino, who wore 13 in his many years with the Dolphins. At the time, Ritter did not make number 13 available for its basketball jerseys, so he thinks he wore 11, he said. Nick’s youngest brother, Luke, wears 13 today at Bishop Chatard High
School, where he plays running back and linebacker for the Trojans.
Nick (shown in a 2006 Indianapolis Star photo by Gary Moore, used here with permission) was a sophomore on the Ritter football team when the 10-4 Raiders lost to Seeger in
the 2004 Class A state championship game. Nick did not have as prominent of a
role on that team’s offense as he would have the next two years.
He became the starting quarterback in 2005, when the Raiders went 6-5. In their 55-7 win in Week 5 over Cincinnati Summit that season, the Raiders threw 12 times and completed only five of those passes. But they got a lot of mileage out of the completions: 256 total yards, and four of the five passes were for touchdowns.
Three of the touchdowns – for 71, 26 and 30 yards – went to junior receiver Joey Anderson and the fourth, for 50 yards, was to junior Obed Bailey. Anderson had yet another touchdown on a 75-yard punt return, Austin Greenan ran 59 yards for a TD, and linebacker Adam Espinoza returned a Summit fumble 29 yards for still another score. Ritter gained 191 yards on the ground and had to punt only once in the game.
Perhaps the most stinging of the five Ritter losses in 2005 was a 24-7 decision in the postseason sectional final to Park Tudor, another Indianapolis private school. The Raiders had defeated the Panthers handily, 34-6, during the regular season. In the sectional rematch, Purichia got the Raiders on the scoreboard first with a 14-yard TD pass to Anderson.
But shortly thereafter, Purichia left the game after suffering a lower leg injury while being tackled on a running play, and the Panthers scored 24 unanswered points in the second half to claim the win. Purichia said the injury came on a draw play that started in the shotgun formation. After taking the center snap, he dropped back to hand off and saw Park Tudor blitzing. As he turned to give the ball to a running back, one of the blitzers dove for his legs and hit him hard.
He said the injury would have required him to miss two or three football games if there had been that many more contests to play in the season. But the loss ended the Raiders’ football season, although he did miss the first three games of the basketball season.
The Raiders would use Purichia’s injury and early departure from the sectional game as motivation fodder when the two teams met twice in 2006.
Soccer, not football, was the sport of choice for Purichia’s teammate Luke Floyd when the latter was growing up. He continued to play soccer as a freshman at Ritter in 2004, but when asked, he also agreed to handle punting chores for the football team that year. An unexpected thrill during a football game would help Floyd put his Ritter soccer-playing days behind him. (An Indianapolis Star photo below by Matt Detrich shows Floyd punting in a 2007 game against Speedway High School.)
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While back to punt in a freshman-year game, a bad center snap forced Floyd to interrupt his rhythm to concentrate on securing possession of the errant ball. Once he’d done that, he looked up to see not only that he was not under threat by the defensive rush but also that there was open space in front of him. He instinctively burst into sprint mode and ran for daylight.
When his scamper downfield ended on a tackle some 30 yards later, he had picked up a huge first down for his team. The adrenaline rush he got from the experience convinced him to stick with football for the rest of his high school years.
Floyd said that the loss to Park Tudor in the sectional title game in 2005, his sophomore year, would be a critical turning point in the Ritter football program. He said it exposed the fact that the Raiders had no suitable backup to take Purichia’s place after the injury knocked the quarterback out of the game. Running back David Henning – whom Floyd said had little if any time practicing at quarterback all season – was sent into the game to play quarterback. The Raiders didn’t score the rest of the game.
“It led to the team to be more organized” in 2006, Floyd said. “Up until then, we basically would ride with Purichia or not at all.”
Purichia confirmed that he had no backup on the 2005 squad. Asked if there was a reason for that, he said he could only speculate. It was possible that because head coach Jim Boswell, in his last season at the helm, was “old school,” he might have felt that there were more important things to focus on.
Boswell left Ritter to coach for two seasons at George Washington High School in Indianapolis, the same school where the “Passing Purichias” had first made their mark. He no longer lives in Indiana, and he could not be reached in Louisiana where he resided in 2022.
By the start of the following season, under new head coach Ty Hunt, who had been Ritter’s defensive coordinator in previous seasons, more emphasis was placed on developing freshman and junior varsity talent so there would always be someone with some experience and training ready to substitute into a “skill position” such as quarterback, running back and wide receiver when starters were sidelined, Floyd said.
Purichia said Ross Hendrickson became his backup at quarterback in 2006. After Purichia’s senior year, Hendrickson would excel at quarterback, leading the Raiders to a 15-0 record and the Class A state championship in 2008, the first high school state championship game played in the newly opened Lucas Oil Stadium in downtown Indianapolis.
Floyd credited offensive coordinator Vince Purichia for being big on integrating the spread offense, which was just fine with Floyd, who thrived on running pass routes.
“Throwing (and catching) the ball made me excited and want to play football,” Floyd said. And at Ritter, he got a fair share of opportunities to do just that. In summers, offensive skill players, including receivers, would get together and run routes and combinations and play 7-on-7 competitions, he said. Floyd remembers going to Brownsburg, a west Indy suburb, for some 7-on-7s. At one point, Raiders players also traveled to the University of Miami (Ohio) for 7-on-7 competitions. He recalls that Ritter fared very well in those.
“We were a little ahead of the game with coach Purichia and Joey, Obed and me,” Floyd said, when it came to high school football programs implementing the spread into their offenses.
“The one thing we lacked,” he added, were big, beefy offensive and defensive linemen. “And a lot of depth. But our skill set athletes were really good.”
In mid-September 2006, Indianapolis Star correspondent Derrek Mallory wrote a feature story highlighting the success of Ritter’s offensive trio of Purichia and speedy receivers Anderson and Bailey.
The Star’s Mallory reported that Purichia threw for 2,172 yards and 23 touchdowns in 2005 and had 1,080 passing yards and 15 TD passes already in 2006. Anderson had caught 17 touchdown passes from Purichia the previous year and had five already in 2006. Bailey caught 19 passes for 310 yards and three TDs in 2005 and had 18 receptions for 271 yards and six TDs thus far in 2006.
The big change in Bailey’s stats over the two seasons most likely is attributable to a switch in offensive positions; in 2005, Bailey was primarily a running back, although Purichia said he threw a lot of passes to him even that season. In 2006, Bailey played wide receiver full time.
Ritter made it through the 2006 regular season with an 8-1 record, the only blemish a 31-26 non-conference home loss to Our Lady of Providence High School of Clarksville, Ind., in Week 3. Ritter played the Pioneers close and even held a 26-24 lead in the fourth quarter. But Matt Lilly scored on a 27-run, his third rushing touchdown of the game, enabling Providence to pull out the win.
Purichia connected on 14 of 30 passes for 276 yards and three touchdowns in the game, but he also had three passes intercepted. Purichia noted that as good as he was in the first half when he notched all three touchdown passes – he was not as good in the second half, when all of three interceptions occurred.
He credited Providence for making effective adjustments to its defense after halftime. That included a decision to apparently assign one defender to a fixed spot in the middle of the field for the whole half. Purichia said it seemed to the Raiders that this defender’s entire job was simply to “watch my eyes” and follow the ball no matter what Purichia did with it or wherever he went with it. The plan worked.
The loss to Providence came on the heels of a close non-conference encounter with Indianapolis Northwest in Week 2, a see-saw scoring affair that the Raiders won, 28-27, avenging a 59-14 thrashing by the Space Pioneers the previous year.
The difference in the 2006 contest came down to the kicking game. Michael Stevens, Ritter’s place-kicker, made all of his extra-point kicks after the team’s four touchdowns. Josh Cody, the kicker for the Space Pioneers, missed his second extra-point, forcing Northwest to try two-point conversions the rest of the game, succeeding on only the last.
Floyd said coaches steered him to the tight end position on offense because they felt Anderson and Bailey were locks as wide receivers. But also, coaches hoped to take advantage of his size and strength to block on plays when he wasn’t running pass routes. Floyd did not mind periodic blocking assignments in high school because he also was given ample opportunity to catch passes, which is what he enjoyed most about playing the sport.
Nick Purichia said Floyd was a valuable teammate at Ritter. “He was tall, and we had a lot of fast receivers with good hands at Ritter, but we didn’t have a lot of size, so he was a good guy to have in that regard. In high school, especially, he was a tough matchup.”
Floyd doesn’t regret discontinuing soccer, though he added that he feels that a concussion in a Ritter football game led to some memory issues over the years.
“I could run routes fine,” Floyd said. Anderson and Bailey were agile athletes, ran great pass routes and were fast, he noted. “But in a straight line, I feel I was just as fast as those guys.”
Floyd’s characterization of his straight-line speed might be a little overstated, at least as it pertains to Anderson, who also ran sprint events as a member of Ritter’s track and field team. His time of 11.36 seconds running the 100 meters in 2006 was second-best in school history at the time. As of 2022, it ranked 10th best. Anderson also ran the first leg of Ritter’s 4x100 relay team in 2006, which held the fifth and 10th best times in school history, also as of 2022.
After two tough early season games, the Raiders breezed through the rest of their 2006 schedule, starting with conquests of Speedway (28-10) and Guerin Catholic (42-18). That brought a Week 6 rematch with Park Tudor, which Ritter won handily, 31-7, an initial success at avenging the loss in the sectional final the previous year. The Raiders would get a chance to punctuate the payback six weeks later in the playoffs.
The next victims, in order, were Beech Grove (35-25), Indianapolis Scecina (28-7) and Heritage Christian (41-13). Purichia noted that in the Beech Grove game, he suffered a shoulder injury, something he would experience twice more in college. The injury would limit his play at quarterback in high school for several games; he would still throw whenever it was required, but he dramatically reduced the number of times he ran with the ball. And he would not play at all on defense until the sectional championship game.
The Raiders drew easy opponents in the first two rounds of the postseason tournament, handling Indiana Deaf, 61-30, and Milan, 42-7, in sectional play. As luck would have it, their opponent in the sectional championship game was … Park Tudor.
That game, played Nov. 3 at Roncalli High School on the Southside of Indianapolis, wasn’t close.
Ritter scored two touchdowns in each of the first two quarters and shut out the Panthers, 35-0. Purichia threw three touchdown passes and was back to running with the ball, gaining 22 yards on five carries. He also made a key contribution on defense while playing safety. Early in the game, he put a quick and hard hit on a Panther receiver who had made a catch, jarring the ball loose for an incompletion. A reception would have given Park Tudor a first down.
After the game, Purichia said Park Tudor had been on the minds of Ritter players a lot since the 2005 sectional game.
“We’ve been talking it about it since a year ago,” he told Paul Shepherd, another correspondent for The Indianapolis Star. “Since we lost, that was all we talked about was Park Tudor.”
Ritter defeated Eastern Hancock, 42-14, in the regional contest on Nov. 10 and advanced to the south semi-state matchup versus Perry Central, a close encounter on Nov. 17 that was determined by a scramble for extra points after touchdowns, just like what had happened early in the season against Northwest.
Ritter scored first on another Purichia-to-Joey Anderson pass, but the extra-point kick failed. Perry Central then scored 20 unanswered points in the second and third quarters to take a 20-6 lead. Perry Central’s extra-point kick after the third touchdown also failed.
By this point, Nick Purichia was feeling a bit unsettled, but a rare mid-game consultation with his father helped put him at ease.
Nick said his father was harder on him as a coach than he was on other players on the team, and the times he was hardest on him were at practices. But he said his father largely steered clear of his son during games, perhaps because of their physical distance from each other. During games, Vince observed from the press box at the tops of grandstands. So he was never in proximity to players on the sideline where he could have pulled Nick aside on the spur of the moment.
Ritter coaching staff and players on the field did have headphones to communicate with Vince upstairs, but Nick said his father largely respected his son’s space during games. At least until the third quarter of the Perry Central game, with the Raiders trailing 20-6.
Nick said someone on the sideline called him over and said his dad wanted to talk to him on the headphones. Nick said he briefly worried that his dad would be angry and make matters worse, but he was relieved when Vince’s words were calming, indicating that the coach had sensed that his son was troubled.
The words of support and confidence were comforting, Nick said, “and I appreciated that.”
In the third quarter, Ritter rallied, starting with a 42-yard touchdown pass from Purichia to Anderson, and the Raiders attempted a two-point conversion, succeeding on a run into the end zone by David Henning, pulling the Raiders to within 20-14.
The only score in the fourth quarter came on another run by Henning, for 1 yard, which tied the score at 20. The extra-point kick by Luke Floyd made the difference in the final tally, 21-20. Floyd was substituting as a place-kicker for a sidelined Michael Stevens, whom Purichia said had rolled his ankle at practice the day before the game and was unable to kick comfortably. (A family photo of Nick with his father and brother Jake appears below. It was taken after the Ritter-Perry Central semi-state game.)
Matt
Hollowell, pictured below in a self-provided photo used with permission, was in his first season on the Ritter coaching staff in 2006, and his
primary responsibility was coaching freshmen, but he said all coaches
attended the varsity games.
“If
you watch the NFL, Nick reminded me of Josh Allen (quarterback of the Buffalo
Bills),” said Hollowell, the seven-inch difference in height notwithstanding (Allen is 6-foot-5, Purichia 5-10). “He could throw the big ball and was accurate.” And
he excelled as a ball carrier.
“Like Josh Allen,” Hollowell said, “he knew what to do” if he had to transition from passer to rusher on the spur of the moment, making him a dual threat. And Hollowell noted that Nick was a top athlete at the other sports in which he participated at Ritter. He was a point guard on the basketball team and a pitcher and played excellent defense on the baseball team.
“They (Nick and Joey) were the original Peyton (Manning) and Marvin (Harrison),” said Hollowell, alluding to the famous Indianapolis Colts quarterback and receiver tandem. “When we needed a big play, we knew what was coming, and the other team knew what was coming.
“It wasn’t just throwing the deep ball to Joey. Joey had the ability to run crisp routes, and Nick’s accuracy … he was able to find (Joey).” Purichia-to-Anderson usually was the go-to play when the Raiders needed to get something big in a hurry, he said.
Anderson had broken his arm late in the first sectional game against Indiana Deaf, forcing him to wear a splint for the duration of the season, making an adventure out of his catches from that point on. A disappointing Anderson pass-catching “adventure” would prove costly for the Raiders in the final game of the season.
The win over Perry Central earned Ritter a spot in the Class A championship game at the RCA Dome against top-ranked, unbeaten and defending champion Sheridan High School.
Sheridan is a small town in northwest Hamilton County, a little more than 30 miles north of Indianapolis. As of 2023, the public high school in Sheridan had won nine Class A state championships in football, all under the direction of head coach Larry “Bud” Wright. At the time Wright won his ninth championship in 2007, it stood as the statewide record at all levels, shared only with Bishop Chatard, which also won its ninth, in Class 3A, in 2007. The nine championships record has since been surpassed by Chatard (which has won seven more titles since 2007 and now holds the record with 16) and three other schools.
Wright also happens to be the winningest high school football coach in Indiana (his record was 457-213 as of the end of the 2023 season). It helps that he’s been at it for a phenomenal 58 years. The Blackhawks were the losing finalist in two other title games with Wright as head coach.
Ritter High School was one of the two schools to defeat Sheridan in a state high school championship game, but Sheridan has had the upper hand against Ritter twice in title games. The first, in 1992, was by the score of 6-0.
In the 2006 regular season, Sheridan – which at that point had won all but two of its state championships – demolished almost every team it played, right up to and including the IHSAA postseason tournament semi-state round.
Only one school that season lost to Sheridan by single digits, but that school, West Lafayette, made it by the smallest of margins: On Oct. 13, Sheridan won their meeting, 37-28. The only other “close” game on the Sheridan schedule before the tournament final was an 11-point decision over Twin Lakes (18-7) on Sept. 1.
The Blackhawks had all but four of their 2005 starters back for the 2006 season, including all-everything offensive, defensive and special teams star Nick Zachery, who was a sophomore in 2006.
Ritter was not inexperienced at this championship game stuff. This was the Raiders’ seventh trip to a finals game, coming out victorious twice.
On the same day Ritter defeated Perry Central, 21-20, in the north semi-state game, Sheridan pulled away from a close match early against Eric Watt and South Newton before winning handily, 63-33. Yes, Ritter had its work cut out for it against the Blackhawks.
“If betting were allowed back then,” Hollowell said, “Sheridan was the favorite.” But he quickly added that he felt Sheridan and Ritter “were clearly the best” Class A teams in the state.
Luke Floyd was asked what he remembers most about the state championship game against Sheridan in 2006. A pause of at least 10 seconds followed. Asked if that meant he had none, he said no one thing stood out, and he said that might be attributable to those memory issues from the concussion he had in high school.
But instead of moving on without a response, he began to recite what seemed like a patchwork of memories, akin to Kolby Harrell’s montage of phrases in the previous chapter:
“I remember plays (but he didn’t cite any) … They (the Blackhawks) were a good, strong, dominant team … I don’t think (Ritter’s) onside kick should have been successful, but it did work, but it didn’t work out (this was a very accurate memory; more on this in a bit) … Purichia launched a long pass to me from the end zone, and I caught it, but I couldn’t get a foot down in bounds. … ” (The Indiana High School Athletic Association’s online play-by-play account of the game does not show a play matching a description of that last memory. That’s not to say it didn’t happen; it’s possible it’s among a few a vague entries in the play-by-play readout.)
When the game was all played out, the teams had given spectators one of the classic matches in Indiana high school football championship game history. Interestingly, each team got there featuring starkly contrasting offensive styles.
It was no surprise that Sheridan attacked the Ritter defense with a punishing run game. By game’s end, the Blackhawks had amassed 304 net rushing yards, with Zachery gaining 137 of those on 22 carries and teammate Taylor Scott 102 yards on the same number of carries. The Blackhawks threw only five passes the whole game, none of them for completions, tying – for the third time – a state championship game record for futility in pass completions and yardage gained. Sheridan’s passing game also had zeroed out in championship games in 1992 and 2005.
Ritter netted only eight total rushing yards (on 22 carries) the whole game, a Class A championship game record low until Fountain Central netted just seven yards in a 52-0 loss to Lafayette Central Catholic three years later in 2009.
“Nick and his demeanor … without him, we’re not in that game,” Hollowell said. “We had (Purichia’s) elite throwing skills, and they had a good running game.”
In the 2006 season up until the championship game, Purichia kept opponents honest with both his passing and running. Those skills helped balance the Raiders’ offense. “That was all Nick,” Hollowell said.
But the running game abandoned Ritter in the title game; Nick “led” Raiders rushers with 10 yards on 7 carries. Corey Pumphrey gained 7 yards on 2 carries. Michael Cummings lost 9 yards on 13 carries.
The Blackhawks got on the scoreboard first on Nick Zachery’s 12-yard run with 6:25 left in the first quarter. The Raiders matched that 4 minutes later when Purichia connected with Obed Bailey on a pass for 25 yards and a score. Michael Stevens, back to doing the place-kicking, converted the extra-point kick. (An Indianapolis Star photo by Joe Vitti below shows Bailey on the first-quarter touchdown pass reception run. The photo is used here with permission.)
Sheridan scored twice more in the second quarter, first on a 2-yard run by Taylor Scott. There was less than 2 minutes left on the clock when the Ritter offense came onto the field following the ensuing kickoff, a short boot that David Henning caught at the Ritter 34-yard line and returned five yards to the 39. The Raiders took over, ready to implement their two-minute offense.
After a 12-yard completion to Michael Cummings put the ball on the Sheridan 49, Purichia connected on a pass to Joey Anderson for 10 more yards. But Blackhawks defender Nick Zachery stripped the ball from Anderson, whose arm was still in a splint from the fracture.
Zachery recovered the dropped ball and returned it all the way into the end zone for a touchdown. That put Sheridan in front, 21-7.
Sheridan coach Wright said after the game that he felt Zachery’s strip, fumble recovery and runback was huge, possibly even a gamebreaker. If nothing else, he said, “I think the fumble recovery was one of the biggest plays of the game.”
If there was any consolation to be had about the fumble for Ritter, it was that only 28 seconds had run off the clock. Ritter had 1:34 left to try and score again before halftime.
Ritter started its drive after the next kickoff at its own 34 yard-line. Purichia connected three times with tight end Luke Floyd on passes covering 18, 22 and 20 yards, the last one giving Ritter the ball at the Sheridan 4-yard line. Cummings ran for 2 yards on first down, and Ritter called timeout, stopping the clock with 24 seconds remaining. (Photo of Purichia below courtesy of Cardinal Ritter High School.)
On second down, Purichia finished the drive with a 2-yard aerial strike to Anderson. This time, Anderson held onto the ball and scored, reducing the Blackhawks’ lead to 21-14 at the halfway point.
It was Ritter’s turn to kick off at the start of the third quarter, and the Raiders pulled a trick out of the Sheridan playbook by trying an onside kick. In the semi-final round the previous weekend, at the very same point in the game, Sheridan successfully executed an onside kick against South Newton, and the offense went on to score a touchdown after getting the short field position. The Blackhawks’ coach Wright felt that play was a huge momentum boost for his team.
This time, Raiders place-kicker Michael Stevens’ short boot traveled the required 10 yards, and teammate Brent Hume fell on the ball at the Sheridan 47-yard line. But game officials threw a penalty flag against Ritter for being offside on the kick, giving the ball to Sheridan at midfield. This is what Luke Floyd was referring to earlier when he said Ritter’s onside kick worked, but did not work out.
Sheridan’s offense was unable to exploit the short field. In fact, the Raiders managed to keep the Blackhawks scoreless the entire third quarter. (A 2006 Indianapolis Star photo below by Joe Vitti shows Ritter head coach Ty Hunt encouraging his team before the start of the state final game. The photo is used here with permission.)
Meanwhile, the Ritter offense had success on a drive that started at its own 34-yard line at the 9:31 mark. The 16-play drive was aided by a fourth-and-2 pass from Purichia to Joey Anderson for 6 yards that gave the Raiders a first down inside the Sheridan 30-yard line. After a third-and-11 pass to Obed Bailey covering 22 yards, the ball was now on the 7-yard line.
A short run sandwiched between two incompletions brought up a fourth-and goal for Ritter. Tight end Luke Floyd lined up alone on the left side of the offense while the wide receivers lined up on the right, Purichia said. On the center snap, Purichia moved to his right while Floyd hesitated on a block before breaking from the line of scrimmage and running to the left flat. Purichia found him wide open and threw, and Floyd caught the ball and marched easily into the end zone. After Michael Stevens’ extra-point kick, the score was knotted at 21 at the 2:21 mark.
“If Luke hadn’t have been open, I probably was going to try to run with it,” Purichia said.
In the fourth quarter, Taylor Scott scored again on a 1-yard run with 9:49 left, pushing Sheridan ahead, 28-21. Ritter tied the score with 2:16 left when Obed Bailey caught an 8-yard pass from Purichia – the quarterback’s record-setting fourth TD pass in a Class A state finals game. Neither Sheridan nor Ritter could score again in regulation. That sent the contest into overtime, a first for a Class A championship game in Indiana.
Sheridan won the coin toss to determine possession order for the overtime session, and the Blackhawks chose to go on defense first. The ball was placed at the 10-yard line for Ritter’s offense. (Purichia is shown below attempting to run against Sheridan in another photo used with permission from Cardinal Ritter High School.)
But who said logic must prevail? Alas, the Raiders tried running plays on the first two downs. Corey Pumphrey gained 2 yards on first down, and Michael Cummings advanced the ball 1 yard on second down.
Years later, Purichia was asked about those play calls, and he agreed that it was “a great question.” But he said the Sheridan defense was putting only three players on the line of scrimmage and two linebackers behind them, which enabled them to spread six defenders in the backfield to thwart the Ritter passing game on a very short field. Essentially, the Blackhawks were daring the Raiders to try and run the ball, which turned out to be a smart dare.
Ritter called time out to devise a third-down play. After the Raiders had blown the first two chances and still were 7 yards from the end zone, Blackhawk defenders knew it would behoove them to expect the pass and set up the defense accordingly, and with ace receiver Joey Anderson vulnerable with a protective device on his arm, they could even hedge their bets that passes would go to either Obed Bailey or Luke Floyd.
When action resumed for third down, Purichia indeed went to the air and turned to Floyd, whom he spotted in the flat again. The ball reached Floyd’s hands, but Floyd couldn’t make a clean catch. The ball popped upward slightly upon contact, and as the tight end was preparing to gather it in and secure it, a defender legally jilted him hard enough for the ball to fall incomplete, Purichia said.
“If no one’s around, he catches it,” Purichia said, who noted that Floyd probably would not have scored if he had been able to secure the catch. More likely, Purichia said, Floyd would have gotten Ritter to the 2- or 3-yard line, and that would have given the Raiders a lot more options to consider for their fourth-down play.
After another timeout, Purichia used the fourth-down play to throw to Obed Bailey, who ran a corner route to the back of the end zone, but a Sheridan defender knocked the ball away. “He wasn’t wide open,” Purichia said, “but they weren’t going to give us anything underneath. I was hoping something crazy would happen” with the throw, but there was no crazy.
It was Sheridan’s turn to take over on offense; the Raiders had their backs to the wall and knew they could not let the Blackhawks score. Not on a touchdown or even on a field goal.
Sheridan needed only two plays to end it. From the 10-yard line, Dustin Colvin ran for 7 yards on first down before Luke Floyd brought him down at the 3-yard line. It was linebacker Floyd’s seventh and final solo tackle of the game.
On second down, Taylor Scott carried the ball into the end zone to give the Blackhawks their eighth championship and second in a row (they would win a third in a row and a ninth in total in 2007). Sheridan finished unbeaten at 15-0. Ritter ended the season 13-2.
Participating in the first overtime championship game in the 34-year history of the IHSAA state finals was small consolation for Ritter, but the Raiders would be back in the title game in short order. Even better, it would have a chance to avenge the 2006 loss to Sheridan.
Purichia and his receivers set 10 Class A state championship team and individual records in the 2006 game and tied one other.
Purichia’s 33 passes attempted, 22 completions, 279 passing yards and four touchdowns were both individual and team records for a total of eight records. Bailey’s two touchdown receptions tied a Class A championship game record. Most of the records have been bettered since, but Purichia still has a share of the Class A championship game record for touchdown passes, as noted previously.
Conversely, Sheridan tied two passing offense futility records for a Class A championship game: zero completions, and zero passing yardage, with Ritter’s defense getting credit for tying the record for fewest passing yards allowed.
Two years later, it was Ritter that entered the title game undefeated and Sheridan’s turn to try and pull the upset while also hoping to win its 10th state championship and fourth in a row, sending all-star senior Nick Zachery out on a title-winning note in each of his four years of high school.
But Ritter’s superior aerial attack in 2008, behind quarterback Ross Hendrickson, who netted 423 yards on 29 of 47 passes and gained a net 84 yards on 16 rushes, was enough to stave off the Blackhawks, 34-27.Zachery rushed for 214 net yards on 26 carries (for an average of 8.2 yards per carry), but between Hendrickson’s passing and John Shockley’s seven pass receptions (including two for touchdowns) for 132 yards the Raiders had enough ammo to negate Zachery’s formidable individual game.
In 2010, Nick Purichia’s brother Jake entered Ritter High School as a freshman. By this time, Ritter had moved up to Class 2A for postseason competition.
Jake needed no breaking-in period to become the signal-caller for Ritter; he was the starter from the get-go in his freshman year. In an early season game against Speedway on Sept. 11, Jake shook off two early interceptions and threw for 208 yards and three touchdowns in a 28-6 victory.
Jake would lead the Raiders to the Class 2A football title game in his junior and senior years. The Raiders lost to Fort Wayne Bishop Luers in the 2012 championship match, 40-28, but they defeated Tipton, 56-6, in 2013 and finished 13-2 and ranked second in the state.
And Vince Purichia’s family finally had won a state championship. It would not be the last.
Jake ended his high school career with 142 career touchdown passes, the most in Indiana high school football history until Gibson Southern’s Brady Allen surpassed him in 2021 by finishing his career with 149. Jake’s 11,655 total yards passing rank third all-time in the state and his 3,718 passing yards in 2013 rank 16th among the best for a single season. Ross Hendrickson, who finished at Ritter in 2009, ranks 25th in the state in career passing yardage with 8,296.
Jake also was second in voting for Indiana Mr. Football in 2013. He would have a standout college career at the University of Indianapolis, completing 448 of 696 passes (64%) for 6,413 yards, 56 touchdowns and just 13 interceptions.
He was redshirted in 2014 and after a year of acclimation to the program in 2015, he became the starting quarterback in 2016, although his season was cut short by injury after six games.
In 2017, he threw for 2,738 yards and 29 touchdown passes and had just four interceptions while leading his team to a Great Lakes Valley Conference championship. The 29 TD passes tied a school record. The same season, he led the Greyhounds to their first undefeated regular season since 1953 and a berth in the NCAA Division II postseason tournament.
Jake earned a bevy of honors after that season. He was named Great Lakes Valley Conference Offensive Player of the Year, was a unanimous All-GLVC First Team selection, and named UIndy’s Offensive MVP and UIndy Offensive Back of the Year. He also was a nominee for the annual Harlan Hill Award given to the top player in NCAA Division II football, often compared in significance to Division I’s Heisman Trophy and Division III’s Gagliardi Trophy.
In 2018, he led the Greyhounds to another conference championship, was an All-GLVC honorable mention and UIndy Offensive Back of the Year. He also helped the Greyhounds earn another appearance in the NCAA Division II postseason tournament and a first-round victory.
A couple of years after college, Jake was recruited to play quarterback in Europe for the professional Catalan Grizzlys French-American football team based in Perpignan, in southeastern France, not far from the Pyrenees Mountains and Mediterranean Sea. In 2019, he signed to play with the Kiel Baltic Hurricanes in the German Football League.
Nick and Jake’s youngest brother, Luke, plays running back and linebacker for Bishop Charard, the north deanery school in the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis. He also plays baseball at Chatard, where his father, Vince, is an assistant coach in both sports.
Luke was a junior in the 2022 football season when the Chatard Trojans defeated Lawrenceburg for the Class 3A championship, and he was a senior in 2023 when Chatard went undefeated and won its state record 17th state championship, defeating Heritage Hill in the final. He also was listed on the roster his freshman year, 2020, when the Trojans defeated Danville for the 3A championship, its 15th title.
And the female siblings in the Purichia family should not be overlooked. Kayla, four years younger than Nick, and Jenna, 12 years behind Nick, were multi-sport athletes at Ritter, and Jenna went on to star in volleyball at DePauw University.
“I saw Kayla as a 9-year-old playing ball with her family,” Matt Hollowell said. She later played basketball, volleyball and softball at Ritter and was an academic honorable mention all-state volleyball player in 2012-13.
Hollowell noted that girls at Ritter hold a Powder Puff football tournament each year in conjunction with fall homecoming. Traditionally, seniors play freshmen and juniors play sophomores in the first round. Seniors rarely, if ever, lose to freshmen. But in Kayla’s first year at Ritter, Hollowell said, that’s just what happened, and the freshmen went on to win the tournament. And every class Kayla was in the next three years at Ritter also won the tournament, Hollowell said.
Lest we get too far off the beaten path … Nick Purichia’s stellar senior season at Ritter caught the attention of small-college football recruiters. Nick said he was aware that his 5-10 height limited his options to small schools, and he visited four of them in Indiana – “the big four,” as he referred to them: Wabash, DePauw, Hanover and Franklin. He said Franklin seemed the most comfortable and the most “like home, like I fit in.”
“Could I have played more if I had gone to one of those other small schools? Probably. But at the time, Franklin (football) was hot,” and head coach Mike Leonard talked about the importance of building relationships, and that emphasis “made a high school lad feel welcome.”
Plus, Leonard showed up at one of his games in his senior year of high school holding a Franklin College jersey bearing his high school jersey number (13) and handed him a Grizzlies playbook to look over. “He said if I didn’t come to Franklin, he knew he’d get these back from me. Things like that … you don’t get” from recruiters from bigger schools, he surmised.
Indeed, Nick Purichia showed up at Franklin College in the fall of 2007. And like Kyle Ray, he would wait for two years, behind established starter Chad Rupp, before getting a serious chance to become the Grizzlies’ starting quarterback.
Below, Nick with wife, Sydney, and children Evie, 3, and Vivi, 1, in a family vacation photo
Tomorrow in Chapter 8: New Teammates
Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons":
Chapter 2: Mastering the Spread
Chapter 3: The Kicker With the Ever-Present Smile
Chapter 4: Like Father, Like Son
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