I attribute the seed for the project to my attendance at the Sept. 26, 2009, football game between Trine University and Franklin College, the game covered intently in Chapter 12 of the series. Four months before that game, I had purchased my first Canon L series (top-of-the-line) camera lens – an EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS – and I was eager to put it to the test at an action sports competition.
I was living in Indianapolis at the time, so in early autumn, I hunted around to find a nearby small-college football game for which I would have a good chance of getting permission to shoot pictures from the sidelines.
Franklin College was a modest drive from Indianapolis, so I contacted the school’s sports information director, Kevin Elixman, and asked if I needed a sideline credential to photograph the Sept. 26 game. I told him I was employed by The Indianapolis Star and would submit some of my photos to the newspaper to use in its suburban news section circulated in Franklin and the Johnson County area. Both statements were true, by the way. He welcomed me to the game, and the newspaper did use a few of my pictures the following week in the targeted zoned news section for Franklin, Johnson County and vicinity.
A year and a half later, in February 2011, when The Star’s corporate owner, Gannett Corp., required employees to take a mandatory week’s furlough, I decided to spend some of my week off perusing the campus of Hanover College in southern Indiana, where my then-new son-in-law, David, had done his undergraduate work. Knowing that I was a photography enthusiast, David mentioned to me how picturesque the campus was, and how it had a scenic bluff overlooking the Ohio River.
While there, I figured I’d try to photograph another sporting event, this time basketball. I contacted Carter Cloyd, then-sports information director at Hanover, ahead of time to see if I could be on the arena floor and take pictures of a men’s basketball game. He said sure. I got there a couple hours before the game, took some campus photos, including several along the bluff that David had told me about, then shot the men’s basketball team victory over Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
I enjoyed that experience so much, that on the drive home I decided to try and go back to the campus to photograph it in its fall-colors splendor. Then an idea hit me to see if I could shoot a football game there in October 2011, too. Months later, when I asked Carter Cloyd about doing that, he again said yes, and I shot Hanover’s football victory over Manchester University on Oct. 22.
On the drive home, another idea occurred to me -- embarking on a personal project to visit every Indiana small college or university that fielded a football team, shoot a game there and take landscape shots of the campus. I’d use my photos as posts at this photography blog, which I’d been maintaining for about three years at the time.
Howard Hewitt, a former IndyStar newsroom colleague, was working at Wabash College at the time, so not long after I got back from Hanover, I asked Howard if it would be possible to get a sideline credential to shoot the next home football game at Wabash, which was Nov. 5. He said no problem, and he invited me to the campus for the Little Giants’ game against Wittenberg. The contest was a key one — it would decide that season’s champion of the North Coast Athletic Conference (Wabash won).
I knew that the following week, Nov. 12, Wabash would travel to DePauw for the annual renewal of the Monon Bell Classic, a pretty important annual football game in all of Indiana, if not in the whole country. So I called DePauw to see if I could shoot that game, and they said yes.
I enjoyed both shoots, so I checked the schedules of other small colleges in the state, hoping at least one other one had made it to the postseason before the curtain fell on the 2011 football campaign. Indeed, Marian University in Indianapolis was to have an NAIA postseason tournament game at its home stadium in two weeks, on Nov. 26. I ran the usual traps, got into the game versus the University of St. Francis (Joliet, Ill.) and took photos (Marian won). By the end of 2011, I already had checked Franklin, Hanover, Wabash, DePauw and Marian off my list.
At the time, there were 14 Indiana colleges and universities that fell within my target pool of small Indiana schools of higher education that had football programs, so I had just nine more to go. I completed the project in 2016, adding Taylor University, the University of Indianapolis and the University of St. Francis (Fort Wayne) the following year (2012); St. Joseph’s College and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in ’13; Manchester University in ’14; Trine in ’15; and Earlham College and Anderson University in ’16.
You can find galleries of each of the football games I shot during my “tour” by following the link in this sentence.
Photos from my campus landscapes are in galleries accessible with the link in this sentence, although there also are galleries there of several other Indiana college campuses that were not part of the tour project.
Right around 2013, two years into the football/campus project, which I had branded (thanks Kyle Ray!) “Game Day,” I started asking myself if I should consider doing something with the photos beyond just using them in posts at Photo Potpourri.
The first idea I came up with to market the photos was to find the best “game day” project pictures and meld them with the respective blog post texts into a dual-focus picture compilation – a type of coffee-table size book about football at Indiana small colleges and those schools’ corresponding campuses – and somehow make it saleable. But I dragged my feet and didn’t get started on that until 2019. At that point, I began to work on the idea in earnest.
But while putting it together, I wasn’t happy with the text portions of the original blog posts that I had planned to carry over into the manuscript. Many of the narratives were thin and needed substantial elaboration. So I began doing more research on all the games and campuses to address that shortcoming. In the process, I found that the stuff I’d been learning about the very first stop on the project “tour” – the 2009 Franklin vs. Trine game – was getting more and more interesting.
I had learned that Trine quarterback Eric Watt, with whom I had been impressed after shooting the game in 2009, had won the Gagliardi Trophy in 2010, the year after I attended the school’s game at Franklin. Then I found out that Kyle Ray, the opposing starting quarterback from that game, had been a top-four finalist for the same year’s Gagliardi. I thought to myself, “Two Indiana players among the top four Gagliardi finalists in the same year? How rare is that?”
It turns out ... that specific situation IS unique. It had never happened before, nor has it happened since. I explored that aspect some more and learned that it was pretty rare for Gagliardi finalists (or future finalists) from Indiana schools to compete on the gridiron against other Indiana finalists. It’s happened in only four seasons, although in two of those seasons it happened more than once.
Then the more I looked at the statistics for all of Franklin College’s games in 2009, and saw how quarterbacks Kyle Ray and Nick Purichia went back and forth as the starter in those games, the more I scratched my head, figuring there had to be a story here. And there was a story there, as it turned out, but it was more involved – at least to me – than what I had imagined.
Then I learned that Eric Watt had played a season of pro ball in the Italian Football League in 2012. After that, I learned a few fascinating back stories. For example, I learned that Kyle Ray’s father, Rob, had been a quarterback at Indian Creek High School a generation before Kyle went there. And that Rob Ray also had played at Franklin College and that he did so under legendary coach Stewart “Red” Faught. And that Rob was a highly respected athlete and individual in high school and college. I also learned that he was a member of the Franklin College Athletics Hall of Fame, that he had been diagnosed with cancer in 2005 and that he died halfway through Kyle’s time at Franklin.
And I learned that Nick Purichia’s father had played in an Indiana high school state high school championship game as a quarterback for Ritter High School, the same Catholic school in Indianapolis that Nick had attended. I already knew that Nick’s younger brother, Jake, had played quarterback in a couple state championship games for Ritter as well, so I thought that delineating the family’s incredible football legacy, not to mention spotlighting Nick’s growing up years, would be a great back story in the project. But that was just scratching the surface; there had been many other quarterback-playing Purichias in the Indianapolis metropolitan area dating to the 1940s.
And as for Eric Watt, well, the story about how he grew and developed into the athlete he became in high school and college is a story the South Newton and Trine communities like to talk about. It is one that all Hoosiers can admire, appreciate and salute, too. Plus, he played with some teammates who I learned, as I was conducting my interviews, had the ability to share and articulate a fascinating anecdote or two, or three.
Their insights picked up the slack I experienced initially when talking to Eric, a reticent sort, something his coaches and teammates had warned me about. After doing two telephone interviews with Eric that produced less than ideal material to work with, I turned to emails to ask him follow-up questions. To my surprise and delight, I found him to be pretty articulate — and thoughtful — in his responses. I concluded that that he felt more comfortable and able to compose his thoughts better when he had time to consider questions carefully. Or perhaps he and I had reached a more comfortable place in this still new writer-athlete relationship. Or both.
Kyle Ray was just the opposite. He enthusiastically welcomed my interest in his story. I had some great interviews with Kyle, who treated his life story as an open book, a trait I admired. The sections of the series when he was struggling at Franklin College, contemplating not returning to the school his senior season and all but oblivious to how his relationship with the girl of his dreams was deteriorating — well, it took a lot for him to put all that out there publicly, but he never flinched at any of my questions. To her credit, neither did Claire Freeman, who is now his wife. Interestingly, contrary to Eric, Kyle was not an email person, and I handled that by appreciating his busy school schedule and the fact that he and Claire had three very young ones at home to parent. But fortunately, he gave it his all in our interviews, and for that I was very grateful. His mother, brother and sister were wonderful interviews as well.
And so was Kolby Harrell, the longtime friend of Kyle Ray. He and I talked for a good hour and a half on Friday, July 22, 2022, on his drive from his current home in the Raleigh area of North Carolina to the National Guard Armory in Wilmington, where he had an upcoming National Guard service stint scheduled. It was evident that he appreciated the trip down memory lane with his experiences and anecdotes about growing up with Kyle and Caleb Raley, none better than the one told in Chapter 6’s “A Moonlight Graham Moment.” That story was so compelling that I asked Kyle for another interview to go over his recollections of Kolby in that final high school game (and to review a few other things), and Kyle delivered wonderfully.
At this point, I decided to put the coffee table book idea on the back burner and flesh out a story putting a spotlight on Indiana small-high school and small-college football by using the early-life stories of Watt and Ray – played out along a parallel timeline – as my primary vehicle. It would present a narrative that showed the two quarterbacks’ divergent football paths on the way to going opposite each other in the Sept. 26, 2009, game at Franklin College. And the story would end with triumphant senior seasons for both men, including appearances together at the Gagliardi Trophy award presentation in Salem, Va.
Nick Purichia’s story was a key secondary plot in the series, although in the beginning, I had hoped to make him an equal third primary storyline. In fact, he was my first interview, on Jan. 25, 2022, when I was still looking at this as a three-pronged storyline venture. He did his best to answer my questions, but I wasn’t convinced he was comfortable with the idea, plus his memory of the Sept. 26 game and a lot of the 2009 season at Franklin College was sketchy. So I didn’t bother trying to explore his Ritter High School years in detail at that time. The next day or so, I sent him a follow-up email containing a link to a web page containing the play-by-play of the 2009 Franklin-Trine game and suggested that reviewing that could help jog his memory for a future interview.
Then, in the next few weeks, I encountered obstacles with other aspects of the Purichia portion of the project. The obstacles were serious and formidable enough to give me pause about whether to proceed with the whole project altogether.
After taking a week to ponder the dilemma, I regrouped and continued to pursue the Watt and Ray storylines. From late February to July 2022, I conducted a lot of research and interviews about those two (plus, I talked to Matt Hollowell and Luke Floyd to buttress the Purichia storyline), so I decided not to abandon the project or the Purichia storyline.
Instead, I devised a plan to reduce the Purichia portion to a secondary plot and make the main focus the Watt and Ray stories laid out along a parallel timeline. In fact, I didn't get back to Purichia until late October, when I called him again to try one more time. He seemed more interested in participating at that point, perhaps because after 10 months he knew the project had not been shelved, and that it indicated to him I was serious all along.
We set up a time for a second interview, and it went splendidly. Better than I had expected, in fact. I wondered if visiting the play-by-play account of the 2009 Trine-Franklin game with the link I’d sent him had been helpful. Or perhaps, like Eric Watt, he had gotten access to game tapes to review. Whichever or whatever, in that October interview he shared extraordinary detail of his role in the Sept. 26, 2009, game and offered some great insights, both while with Franklin College and at Ritter. It revived my hope that his storyline would remain the important element that I had envisioned.
There were quite a few people I reached out to — players, family and coaches — who did not respond to my invitations to participate or declined to do so. And there was one player, South Newton High School place-kicker Nelson Orellana, who I tried every which way to find … just short of buying a classified ad in hopes that my plea for help finding him in the media would reach someone who knew where he was or how to get in touch with him. I really did come close to buying that ad, and went as far as getting a price quote before pulling back at the last minute.
As pleased as I was with the way the series turned out, I believe that having all of those additional voices and perspectives — or at least a majority of them — would have made it even better.
I hope you enjoyed this story behind the story … and even more importantly, enjoyed the fun, memories and good times that all “the stars” of On Hoosier Gridirons had to share.
Previously in the series:
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
Chapter 6: A Moonlight Graham Moment
Chapter 7: 'Clearly the Best' Small-School Teams in Indiana
Chapter 9: Farewell, Levi ... and Welcome, Pup!
Chapter 10: Waiting Their Turns
Chapter 14: A Quarterback's Prayer
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