CHAPTER 1Franklin CollegeSept. 26, 2009

Franklin 30, Trine 29

In the last full week of September 2009, it had rained almost every day in central Indiana.

But on Saturday Sept. 26, the clouds disappeared and made way for the sun to shine all day. Temperatures were perfect for an afternoon of college football. And that very thought of how it seemed like a perfect day for college football went through my head as I drove the 30 or so miles south from Indianapolis to Franklin, the seat of Johnson County, to photograph the game between the Franklin College Grizzlies (1-1) and the 22nd ranked Trine University Thunder (2-0).

At Stewart “Red” Faught Stadium at Franklin College, football fans tailgated outside the stadium just before the game.

In 2009, the Grizzlies were striving to win their third consecutive Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference championship. They had defeated non-conference foe Baldwin-Wallace College, 38-31, in Berea, Ohio, in their season opener three week earlier. But they lost to Butler University at home, 49-19, the following week in another non-conference matchup. They’d had a week off coming into the game against Trine, their last non-conference game of the regular season.

Defeating Trine – like Franklin, an ascending NCAA Division III power – would be a tall order. In 2008, the two teams met at Trine in Angola, Ind., and roles were reversed: Franklin came into the game ranked 21st in NCAA Division III, while Trine was looking to beat its first ranked team as an NCAA D3 program. Trine rose to the challenge, slipping past Franklin 30-27 on its way to an undefeated regular season before losing in the first game of the NCAA Division III postseason tournament. 

The Thunder had an uneven start to 2009, escaping with a 16-14 win at Manchester University, whose team would finish the year only 5-5. Then they enjoyed a 40-9 romp over HCAC member Defiance (Ohio) College at home. Despite the struggle versus Manchester, Trine nevertheless had a place in the Top 25 rankings of NCAA Division III schools.

The pass rush of Franklin defensive lineman Joshua Bales (52) is delayed at the line of scrimmage (above) by a fallen blocker for Trine quarterback Eric Watt, who will get this pass off uncontested. Below, on a separate down, Watt begins a hand-off to running back George Outlaw.

Franklin had another factor in its favor; it was coached by Mike Leonard, who had extensive college and pro experience when he took over the job in 2003.

After a rough few seasons, Leonard led the Grizzlies to conference championships and postseason games in 2007 and 2008, and in the latter, the team made it to the tournament quarterfinals, the school's postseason high mark during his tenure as head coach from 2003 to 2019. His Franklin teams would eventually win or share 11 HCAC titles and qualify for the postseason playoffs nine times before Leonard stepped down.

Franklin was the first to score in the 2009 game. Machy Magdalinos kicked a 27-yard field goal, giving the Grizzlies a 3-0 lead in the first quarter. Trine then scored 13 unanswered points before Franklin’s Nick Mongan ran the ball into the end zone from 1 yard out with 20 seconds left in the first half, enabling the host team to go to the locker rooms down only 13-10.

Trine increased the lead to 23-10 late in the third quarter on a Jeremy Howard field goal and a 24-yard Eric Watt pass to Cody Nash-Kniffen (see picture above). But Franklin came right back. 

With 40 seconds left in the quarter, Grizzlies’ quarterback Nick Purichia, spelling Kyle Ray (shown in the lead-off photo), connected with Ryan Momberger for a 15-yard touchdown pass, and after the extra-point kick, the home team was within 23-17. That's Momberger below on his scamper to the end zone. 

Above: Franklin defenders Jesse Mercer (33) and Joe Rush (47) combine to bring down Trine’s JaVontae Hence after a 6-yard pass reception in the third quarter. 

At 9:43 in the fourth quarter, Purichia (pictured above making a short gain on a quarterback keeper) scored on a 9-yard run, capping an eight-play 82-yard drive, and after the conversion kick, Franklin inched ahead, 24-23, its first lead since 3-0 in the first quarter.

In just two and a half minutes, Trine responded by going 79 yards on seven plays.

Quarterback Watt (#13 in photo below) scored on a 24-yard run, putting the Thunder up 29-24 with 7:13 left in the game. But a failed two-point conversion pass play after the touchdown proved to be critical.

 

The Franklin offense took the field after the ensuing kickoff, and after a 13-play drive, the Grizzlies finished the day’s scoring with 2:43 left on the clock when Purichia tossed a 13-yard pass to Adam Mellencamp in the end zone. The Grizzlies also tried a two-point conversion to hopefully create a three-point advantage. But it, too, failed. Fortunately, the 30-29 lead held up in the end. The Grizzlies' defense stopped Trine on a fourth-down play on the Thunder's next offensive possession, and the Franklin offense then ran out the clock. 

Both teams created a lot of offense in the game. Trine relied heavily on quarterback Watt, who led the Thunder in rushing, gaining 120 yards in 17 attempts and one touchdown. He completed 27 of 39 passes for 233 yards and three touchdowns. He'd given the Grizzlies' defense fits all game long.

Franklin’s quarterback tandem of Kyle Ray and Nick Purichia completed a combined 33 passes out of 56 attempts for 335 yards and two touchdowns. Where Franklin came up short was in the rushing game. Four rushers had a combined total of 96 yards – 24 yards less than Watt gained by himself – with Mitch Downs leading the way with 44 yards on 10 carries.

Safety Jesse Mercer (#33 in photo above) led the Grizzlies’ defense with 10 tackles – nine solo – and had Franklin’s only interception, which snuffed out a Trine scoring drive in the second quarter. Mercer was named the HCAC Defensive Player of the Week for his efforts.

The following week, the Grizzlies were rewarded by entering the D3 rankings at No. 22. Trine, on the other hand, dropped out of the rankings, but that wouldn't last long.

The Grizzlies started October enjoying three more victories before falling in consecutive weeks to Mount St. Joseph’s (the eventual 2009 HCAC champion and postseason NCAA D3 tournament representative) and Rose-Hulman. They also fell out of the rankings, finishing the regular season with two wins and a 7-3 overall record (5-2 in the conference).

After dropping its game to Franklin, the Thunder won the rest of their regular season games, eventually return to the rankings, claim another undefeated Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association championship and defeat Case Western Reserve 51-28 in the first round of the D3 postseason playoffs. They lost to North Coast Atlantic Conference champion Wittenberg in the second round and finished the year ranked 17th in D3.

As for Eric Watt ... well, his accomplishments at Trine were staggering. By the time he graduated in December 2010, he would lead the Thunder to 20 straight MIAA wins; three consecutive MIAA football titles; two consecutive postseason D3 Sweet 16 appearances; and a three-year regular season record of 29-1 (the 2009 loss to Franklin being the only blemish).

Furthermore, Watt would be named:

* MIAA player of the week seven times in his career;

* MIAA offensive most valuable player in 2009 and 2010;

* All-conference quarterback in 2008, 2009 and 2010;

* To the MIAA all-academic honor roll in 2009 and 2010.

* Winner of the 2010 Gagliardi Trophy, NCAA Division III’s most prestigious individual football award (D3’s equivalent to the well-known Division I Heisman Trophy). Franklin quarterback Kyle Ray, who had started the 2009 game against Trine for the Grizzlies, would enjoy a stellar 2010 season and join Watt among the four finalists for the Gagliardi Trophy. 

In 2016, Watt was inducted into his school’s athletics hall of fame, and in 2019 he was named to the school’s All-Quarter-Century Football Team.

Franklin Coach Mike Leonard would complete his career with a record of 129-44. The wins total was the second most as a Franklin College football coach, behind only the legendary Red Faught's 159. Leonard was named HCAC football coach of the year seven times in his 17 seasons at Franklin.

To read a more detailed account of this game, follow the link in this sentence. The link takes you to a chapter from my recent On Hoosier Gridirons multi-part blog series, a chapter that focuses entirely on this game. To view a full gallery of images from this game, follow the link in this sentence. 

Above:  Franklin ball carrier Mitch Downs (22) runs for a short gain early in the first quarter. 

Above: Franklin's Joshua Bales (52) notched the Grizzlies' only sack of Watt, costing the Thunder offense 7 yards. It came at 9:17 of the first quarter. 
 

Above: Machy Magdalinos (14) attempts one of his three field goal tries (below).

Franklin running back Nick Mongan (above) runs for yards along the right sideline after a first-half pass reception. Below, cornerback Ross Tierney (8) wrestles Trine's Paul Curtis (5) to the ground after the Thunder wide receiver caught a first-half pass from Eric Watt. 

 

Trine quarterback Eric Watt (above) kept the Franklin defense on its toes throughout the game. Below, in the second play of the second quarter, he looked for an open receiver, which would turn out to be Paul Curtis (#5 in second photo below). Curtis made the catch across his body at the 50-yard line and fought his way to the Franklin 43 for a 20-yard gain. It was Curtis’ 50th career reception at Trine. 

Above: Later in the second quarter, Franklin's Jesse Mercer intercepted a Watt pass in the end zone to thwart a Thunder drive. 

Franklin quarterback Kyle Ray (above) is off on a run in the first half. Below, as Ray is back to pass, offensive tackle John Werbe (70) has his jersey stretched by Trine defensive lineman Chris Eichman (obscured by Ray).

Above: Trine's Mario Brown takes off running after receiving Franklin's kick-off following Machy Magdalinos's 27-yard field goal with 5 minutes left in the first quarter. Brown returned the kick nine yards before being tackled by Franklin special teams member Isaac Davis.

In this game, Franklin quarterbacks Nick Purichia (13, above) and Kyle Ray completed a combined 33 out of 56 passes for 335 yards and two touchdowns, both by Purichia.  

Next up: Chapter 2, Franklin College campus

Previously in Game Day Revisited:

Introduction

Introduction to ... Game Day Revisited

For the past few years, I’ve been working on putting together manuscripts related to various photography projects I have worked on over the years.

I began to publish them here at this blog, beginning last summer, with On Hoosier Gridirons, a non-fiction account of two gifted athletes, Eric Watt and Kyle Ray, who grew up in small towns and attended small high schools and colleges at opposite ends of Indiana. 

These young men played quarterback on their school teams, traveling divergent paths in pursuit of excellence and success, never facing each other on the gridiron until their junior years in college. I conveyed their stories by using a dual timeline approach. The timeline led directly to the game in which they finally faced each other. 

Next came a picture-dominant series titled Garfield Park … in Pictures, a 40-installment display of my years of photo documentary work of various facets of Garfield Park, a regional park in Indianapolis. This series debuted Feb. 20 of this year and ended more than a month later on April 1.

After that, I did a one-off retrospective of photographs that I took at 17 performances in the Indy Acoustic Cafe Series from 2010 to 2015. By "one-off," I mean that I included six to nine photos from each show that I photographed into a single post here. 

These pictures had appeared once previously at the blog, but each show's photos appeared at the time of the show within the aforementioned time frame, so they were spread out at the blog. The anthology I put together this year brought them all together in a single post.    

If you've missed any or all of these, and the summaries above somehow pique your interest now, I've provided links for each that can get you started on any of the three (or all of them).     

Today, I’m launching another multi-chapter series that longtime visitors to Photo Potpourri should recognize from blog posts that were scattered over a seven-year period, specifically 2009 to 2016. It was for a project I called “Game Day.” 

The project took me to 14 small colleges and universities in Indiana that had football programs. At each of those schools, I photographed at least one football game. And because I have a genuine appreciation for the aesthetic appeal of college campuses, I also made landscape photos at each stop on the tour. For each visit, I posted game pictures on one day at this blog, then campus images on the next. 

For the purposes of my project, my definition of a small college or university was any NCAA or NAIA Division II or III school. At the time Game Day technically began in 2009 and finished it in 2016, only 14 Indiana schools met that definition. They were Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology; Franklin, Wabash, Hanover, Earlham and St. Joseph's colleges; DePauw, Marian, Taylor, Manchester, Trine and Anderson universities; and the universities of Indianapolis and St. Francis in Fort Wayne. (Since then, Earlham has suspended its football program, and St. Joseph's has closed as a traditional four-year institution.)  

Because the posts from the original Game Day project, like those of the Indy Acoustic Cafe, were scattered over several years, I realize many folks might not had a chance to see them all. Or even any of them. 

So in this new series, which I’m calling Game Day Revisited, blog visitors can enjoy the full collection of installments from the original project — but updated and with some new photos included — in posts that will go active on consecutive days over a much more compact period of time. 

In case you're wondering, these posts will not be a simple copy-and-paste thing from the previous posts. True, I did use a copy of the originals to begin composing each of the posts for this new series. But I have gone back into each one to fix typos, double-check facts, update information, add information, and swap out, improve and/or add new photographs into each one. 

In some cases, the picture changes are minor, but for others they are significant. But in almost all cases, the text with each game post is expanded, containing new information. These game posts are longer than the originals, whether it is because of additional information, more pictures ... or both. 

I also will provide considerably more information for each of the campus posts as well. The campus chapters will immediately follow (on the next day) the chapters of the school's respective football game, just as I did for the original project. 

And like I did for the three recent series mentioned at the top of this post, I created a special logo for Game Day Revisited, and that's the logo you see leading off this post. It's a shot from one of my last stops on the tour, in Richmond, Ind., for Earlham College vs. Southern Virginia. I figured that game was appropriate given that the year after I visited Richmond, Earlham officials suspended the football program indefinitely. To this day, it remains in suspension.

Game Day Revisited posts will be presented in chronological order of visits on the tour. It also will include a bonus game that I did not consider part of the original project. That bonus game was a second stop (in 2012) at Franklin College. 

This new series also will include three bonus non-game chapters -- one on tailgating photos I took at all the stops on the tour, another on school mascots and the third on marching bands, pep bands and/or dance teams at schools that had such units. They will be sprinkled about in the series chronology, although I will note that the one on marching and pep bands and dance teams will conclude the series. 

As alluded to above, the installments will be labeled as chapters (borrowing from the organizational system I used for On Hoosier Gridiron and Garfield Park ... in Pictures). 

I'll begin tomorrow with Franklin College, and its Sept. 26, 2009, game against Trine University.

This particular game (from which the photo above is taken) was examined intently in Chapter 12 of the On Hoosier Gridiron series, so if you were along for the full ride of On Hoosier Gridirons, you can be excused (and forgiven! LOL) if you pass over that first chapter of Game Day Revisited. 

But you might want to come back the next day for Chapter 2, which will feature images from the Franklin College campus landscape. Photo Potpourri will use this series to present ALL of those Franklin College campus photos for the first time. I had not decided to begin the original Game Day project at the time I visited Franklin College in 2009 (even though I grandfathered it into the project as my first stop once I decided to make the tour a project). 

And as it turns out, I never did a blog post on the campus landscapes shots that I took at Franklin College, most of which were made a month before that 2009 game.

Because I visited 14 schools on my Game Day tour, that means there will be a minimum of 28 chapters in total (two for each school -- one for game shots, and another for landscape shots). But there also will be a second visit to two schools for game shots. 

As I mentioned above, I went to Franklin College a second time in 2012. But I also visited Wabash twice, once in 2011 for an early game on the tour. That was before I decided to photograph the Monon Bell Classic contests between Wabash and archrival DePauw University at each of their home fields. Given that my first Monon Bell Class game was at DePauw in 2011, I elected to go back to Wabash in 2012 to photograph the Little Giants as the home team.

And on top of all that, I'll have the three aforementioned bonus chapters of tailgating, mascots and marching/pep bands and dance teams. Some of the tailgating images were part of the original series presentations, but there are some new shots in the package as well. 

As a example of a new photo that will be used in the series, I present the image above of Dwenger Hall from the campus of St. Joseph's College. This picture was not part of the original post of the school's campus shots in 2013. But it will be in the St. Joseph's campus chapter in Game Day Revisited, and you'll learn its interesting history in the process. 

And as another teaser, while doing research and preparing chapters for this new series, I learned some interesting history and background about the Marian University campus. I'll share that with you when we get to that point of the series. 

I’ve sprinkled some game and campus photos from the project into this introduction so you’ll have an idea what to expect in the days and weeks ahead.

I hope these series have been enjoyable for you ... and that I have made it worth your while to spend a little time here each day.

Coming tomorrow: Chapter 1, Franklin College, Sept. 26, 2009

Reacquaintance with a forgotten lens

It had been a very long time — quite possibly even more than a decade — since I had last used my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens. It had been stored in the gear bag holding my backup DSLR, a Canon 7D, and that gear bag is stored on a shelf in an office closet.

The lens came to mind Friday as I perused dozens of flowers that Lee Ann and her daughter had brought home from a shopping trip earlier in the day. I wanted to do some new photography, and using the macro lens on my Canon 6D to photograph all these flowers struck me as an opportunity to do that.

The pictures you see in this post are a result of that endeavor. How did the shoot with a macro lens go after years of not using it? I’d say I had mixed results. My efforts to take multiple shots of the same bloom but using different points of focus worked out nicely in a few instances. In others, not so much.

For example, look at the pink flower leading off the post and the violet one above. I made points to take each one of these with two focuses -- the center (stamen) of the flower and the petals themselves. The one of the pink flower shows the latter focus, the violet one shows the former. Below are their immediate opposites.

But in general, I found I had to get reacclimated to the lens’s auto focus, which takes requires a few seconds to hunt when I switch subjects. That reminded me of a reason I may not have used it much in recent years, buy I got used to it again quickly.

Then I had to remember the sensitivity of the aperture when shooting closeup shots. I made a lot of shots, adjusting apertures along the way to perfect the object of various compositions. Above is an example of one of my bigger challenges. I tried to line up with the smaller, unopened blooms to be on the same plane as the main bloom so I would have sharp focus across the board. 

It was difficult to verify whether I had succeeded on the small (relatively speaking) LCD screen at the point of shoot. It wasn't until I got the image up in post-processing that I saw that I probably should have stopped down another stop or two to fully accomplish my objective. But this came pretty close.

Almost as challenging were the first two flowers below -- getting the patterns on the inside of the bloom to come in sharp. 

A lot of shots required me to get low to the ground because the flowers were still in their small pots or plastic containers, and I had nothing handy that was higher to move them to temporarily. Because of knee and other joint discomfort I was experiencing doing that, I found myself rushing and/or not making multiple shots in some situations … and suffering the consequences later in post-processing when I came across images in which the shutter speed had been too slow. (Unfortunately, this Sigma macro lens does not have OS [optical stabilization] to correct camera shake). So I tossed out a dozen or more shots because they were blurred due to shutter speeds that were too slow.

Still, I ended with enough “keepers” to justify doing this blog post. I hope you enjoyed these.