Eric was hoping to go to Indiana University, according to Ron Watt, Eric’s father, but the coaches there told Eric that while he would make the team, he wouldn’t play much.
Eric said Butler was on his short list along with Tri-State University in Angola, Ind., which had not yet changed its name to Trine. He made multiple visits to Tri-State as well, and buddy Andy Rodriguez said he accompanied Eric on all of those.
“I liked it and wanted to play there,” Andy said. “They (Tri-State recruiters) knew that if they got me in, Eric would come, too.” Tri-State did invite Andy eventually, and that move – combined with the fact that Eric’s girlfriend, Sara Hivley, a 2006 South Newton graduate, already was enrolled there – helped persuade Eric to go there as well.
Tri-State head football coach Matt Land said his school put Watt on its radar during the quarterback’s junior year in high school. By luck, an acquaintance of Land’s who was coaching at a school near Logansport, Ind., had been screening “crossover” film of a game involving South Newton. The acquaintance called Land and told Matt, “You really need to look at this kid,” referring to Eric Watt. “That’s all it took for me,” Land said. “He’s a good player.”
Tri-State recruiters devoted considerable effort to bring Eric to Angola, Land said. “There were a lot of MAC (Mid-American Conference) schools that were after him, so we had to spend a lot of time on him for sure.”
And once the coaching staff had time to watch their new recruit at length in preseason camp in 2007, they very much liked what they saw.
“We knew right away that he could throw the ball,” said Land. “Freshman quarterbacks … it takes a while for them to learn the offenses. Our offenses are obviously more complex, and the defenses they’re seeing are obviously more complex. And it takes a little while for them to get up to speed and comfortable. But we knew pretty early on that we had a special one.”
Watt,
who also starred in basketball at South Newton, said he would have preferred to
play that sport in college, but he said there weren’t many schools looking for
a player who was “six-foot-one and 165 pounds when soaking wet.”
“He was such a natural, instinctive athlete, so I always enjoyed watching him play any sport because I liked how effortless he made it look,” Willey said.
And as good as Watt was at basketball, Willey felt that Ben Welsh, “a great ball handler,” was the best player on the South Newton basketball teams of 2006-07 (Watt’s senior year) and 2007-08 (Willey and Welsh's senior year). Because Watt was in demand more for his football skills, he opted to play that sport in college.
As amazing as his son had performed in his senior year of football at South Newton High School, Ron Watt said he felt that Eric’s better days were ahead at college, where he said his son would become more aggressive as a ball carrier.
“There was a big transition for him between high school and college,” Ron said. “He could see the field so well in college that if a play wasn’t going to work, he’d take off (running) with the ball.”
Indeed, when he left the university, Watt ranked among the school’s top 10 career ball carriers. Even today, his 1,535 career rushing yards rank sixth all time at the school.
Watt and Rodriguez roomed together freshman year at Tri-State, and Rodriguez said they got along extremely well in that new environment. “We went everywhere together. We had a good time. It was easy for us to get along,” Rodriguez said. They did not room together at school after that year, however.
Arriving at Tri-State at the same time as Watt and Rodriguez were Andrew and Jeremy Pickford, twins who had starred in football at Sand Lake (Mich.) High School, and Paul Curtis, who had played quarterback and defensive back at his hometown Ross Beatty High School in Cassopolis, Mich. Like Watt and Curtis, Jeremy Pickford played quarterback on his high school team.
Andrew Pickford said he and his brother chose Tri-State because Jeremy had researched schools in the vicinity of their hometown and found that the university in Angola, Ind., had a good engineering program, in which Andrew was interested. He also was excited about playing defensive backfield, and recruiters gave him reason to believe he could do that at Tri-State; he had played tailback and linebacker in high school.
Finally, Andrew said that during his recruitment he had heard that Tri-State was considering building a dome over the football field, or somehow enclosing the playing field, something that piqued his interest. He knew the climate of late autumn and winter in northern Indiana wasn’t a whole lot better than that of southern Michigan where he grew up.
Matt Land, back then the head football coach, confirmed that a dome or some kind of field enclosure had been under consideration in the first decade of the new millennium. Land said he and school officials “spent a lot of time” studying the possibility.
“We
never could get, to my satisfaction, the dimensions in height and everything
correct with what I wanted to make sure it (the field enclosure project) had.
And at the end, I decided, and the school decided, that kicking those dollars
and putting (them) into the (building) addition that we added would bring more
value to the football program.”
The work on those improvements started early in 2008 with converting the grass football field surface to artificial turf. The new turf was ready for use by the start of the 2008 football season. By the time the major improvements project was finished in 2010, a building addition had been attached to Fred Zollner Stadium, lights had been added to the football field, and new and expansive home-side bleachers had been installed.
“The
visiting side bleachers (today) are basically where our home side of the field had been,” Land said. “We added a whole complex onto the
north side of the stadium,” the Metal Technologies Inc. Health and Fitness
Center (shown above in an October 2015 photo by Joe Konz). The new athletics
department facilities were a major component of a $75 million campus-wide
facilities improvement project.
The photo above, also taken by Joe Konz in October 2015, shows the new home team side of Zollner Stadium, which includes, in the background, the new coaches’ and broadcast booths (the latter named the Jack and Sue Shaw Press Box). Also shown are the artificial turf and two of the new field light poles. The stadium is used by the schools soccer and lacrosse teams as well as the football team. The new fitness center shown in the previous photo is behind the stadium in this picture.
All of the additions, said Land, who stopped coaching after the 2014 season and today is the school’s director of athletics and assistant vice president for athletics, “were way better use of our dollars than just putting an enclosure over the football field.”
Paul Curtis, among the first class of football players who would benefit from the new facilities, was making a change in positions when he arrived on campus in 2007. He had played both offense and defense in high school, and played offense and returned kicks at Angola. On offense in college, he played wide receiver, not quarterback like in high school. It would turn out to be a good choice for him; by the time he completed his eligibility, he held or shared many school pass reception records, some of which he still possesses today.
Eric Watt, Andy Rodriguez and the Pickfords became good friends in short order. Jeremy Pickford, because he played behind Watt at quarterback his first two years, made the first inroad among the Pickfords in connecting with Watt. Andrew Pickford joined the buddies' circle soon enough. After the athletes moved to housing off campus in later years, the Pickfords lived just a couple blocks from Watt’s place. Andrew said he and Watt remain friends today and talk to each other just about every week.
Jeremy Pickford’s journey at Tri-State had a disappointing start, according to his brother. During a preseason practice freshman year, Andrew said, Jeremy was moved to defensive safety to try some plays there, and on one pass play, he jumped high to knock down a pass and landed awkwardly, injuring a knee.
During surgery, doctors took tissue from a hamstring to repair the knee’s torn anterior cruciate ligament. Unfortunately, it was the hamstring – not so much the knee – that never fully recovered, Andrew said. He said Jeremy lost a bit of speed afterward. Though he served as Watt's backup at quarterback through his sophomore year, Jeremy moved to defense his last two years. And in his senior year, Jeremy split time at outside linebacker with Brandon Killingbeck.
During a 2008 preseason practice his sophomore year, he hit a fullback teammate hard on a tackle and injured his back. He said tests showed stress fractures in the lumbar region, and he never played again. He did, however, continue his education there and spent the next three seasons as a student assistant football coach.
After graduation, he got an assistant coaching job at the university, two assistant coach stints at Olivet (Mich.) College and spent two seasons as defensive coordinator at his high school alma mater, South Newton, before landing an assistant coaching position at Harrison High School in West Lafayette, Ind., in 2021.
As it turned out, Eric Watt showed off his basketball skills often enough while in college. Teammate Andrew Pickford recalled how football players often went to the gym after a day of training and played pickup basketball. A lot of the football players had played basketball in high school, he noted, and they were still skilled in the sport.
That included Eric, whom Andrew recalled doing a two-handed alley-oop jam over linebacker Brandon Killingbeck in one such game. Killingbeck also was a good basketball player in high school, Andrew noted, and Killingbeck’s younger sister, Haley, also skilled in the sport, played on the women’s team at the university.
Pickford also recalled that Eric dunked over a university basketball coach during an intramural game, which Andrew felt might have prompted the school at some point to ask Eric to consider playing on the varsity basketball team, too.
If there ever were any consideration by basketball coaches to recruit Eric onto the team, Eric was unaware of it.
“If I recall correctly, that (dunk) game was during winter of my junior year,” he said, “so the basketball team was already in season, and I graduated a semester early, so I believe that would have made me ineligible for my senior year. I do not specifically remember ever having a conversation about joining the team. It’s very possible the football coaches had a talk with the basketball coaches to leave that off the table.”As for his earlier years at the campus in Angola, he said he spent those focusing on adding weight to his frame, and basketball would have hindered that. “But yes, I’m an Indiana kid and had a love for basketball. It was always something I wish I would have/could have done in college.”
Andrew said he played on college intramural basketball teams with brother Jeremy and fellow football team members Killingbeck, Curtis, tight end Tom Wyman, receiver JaVontae Hence and defensive lineman Christian Verley. Eric said he played on intramural teams with football players that included, invariably, Killingbeck, Wyman, the Pickford brothers, Isiah and Bryan Craig, Luke Rosengarten and Jake Vance.
“We were called the Farm League and played basketball and volleyball,” Eric said. “I know we won at least one volleyball championship and would go to the basketball championship (game) every year, getting beat by another football players’ team.”
Andrew said a handful of football players converse in a group chat on an almost weekly basis today, and a lot of memories from those football practices and basketball exploits come up frequently in good-natured teasing. Eric acknowledged the periodic group chats and confirmed that Killingbeck still to this day gets reminded of the dunk. “It has to be up there in my most athletic moments.”One of the chat group’s other favorite football stories is how Eric has fun bragging that he “laid out” Andrew Pickford during a runback of a pass Pickford intercepted in a team practice. In practices, it was mandatory that players not hit or touch their quarterbacks so as to protect them from inadvertent injury. But Pickford said it wasn’t beyond Watt to mount a playful, if half-throttled, chase of someone like Pickford if the teammate picked off one of his passes at practice.
On the day he supposedly “laid out” Pickford, Eric might have given Pickford a soft push that was enough to cause him to lose control of his forward momentum, trip and fall, Pickford said, causing one of Pickford’s cleats to fall off a foot in the process.
And that, Eric felt, entitled him to brag about how he “laid him out” with such “force” that it knocked a cleat off Pickford’s foot.
The incident is one of Eric’s favorite to relive on group chats, Pickford said, adding that his response every time the story surfaces is that the important thing about the interception was that Pickford scored a touchdown on the interception return.
Coming to Tri-State required a minor sartorial adjustment for Eric Watt, a fan of the jersey number 13, which he wore while in high school.
Junior punter Nate Fitzsimmons wore No. 13 when Watt arrived in 2007, so Watt was assigned jersey No. 10 his freshman year and he elected No. 7 his sophomore season because it was the number worn by NFL quarterback Michael Vick, another favorite player of his. After Fitzsimmons exhausted his eligibility, Watt claimed No. 13 for his final two seasons.
Tomorrow in Chapter 9: Farewell, Levi ... and Welcome, Pup!
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
Chapter 5: Where Legends Played
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