CHAPTER 10Waiting their turns

A few games into his freshman season in 2007, quarterback Eric Watt had already taken over the job of directing the Tri-State football team’s offense in Angola, Ind.

That same year, Nick Purichia and Kyle Ray arrived at Franklin College, where the Grizzlies played their home games at Stewart “Red” Faught Stadium (shown below in a 2009 Joe Konz photo) under the guidance of head coach Mike Leonard.

Leonard had played quarterback at Hanover College in southern Indiana, where he graduated in 1984 with a double major in business administration and physical education. He served two coaching stints as offensive coordinator at Hanover in the years thereafter. In fact, he came to Franklin College to be head coach in 2003 after his second stint (1999-’02) at Hanover, and in four seasons at Franklin, he’d compiled a record of 21-19, including an impressive 9-1 mark the previous year, 2006.

Leonard started his coaching career in 1984, right out of Hanover, as a graduate assistant at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. In 1986, he served as a graduate assistant at the University of Alabama.

Then came the first stint as offensive coordinator at Hanover, then a year coaching wide receivers at Holy Cross College, and a year coaching quarterbacks at Butler University in Indianapolis before taking the first of two stints in the 1990s as offensive coordinator for the highly successful Seagulls¹, an American football team in the X-League, the top-level of gridiron football competition in Japan. After two years as offensive coordinator for Wittenberg University, Leonard returned to the Seagulls for a year in 1998. Then came his second stint at Hanover.

One thing about Mike Leonard has been constant: He has been beloved by players and coaches alike throughout his coaching career, which lasted through the 2019 season, when he stepped down from the Franklin job. In a July 2014 interview with the Johnson County Daily Journal, he said coaching isn’t about him.

“It’s about team,” he said. “Some people have egos that can’t fit through that door frame. I sure hope people don’t think I have one. We host football camps here in the summer, and as I watch some of these assistant high school coaches teach their players, there are guys out there that are 24 years old that know more football than I do right now.

“I think my strength is trying to rally everyone together for a common cause and get them going in the same direction.” 

Nick Purichia and Kyle Ray had been among the top Indianapolis area high school quarterbacks in 2006. Both had been among that area’s top five in total passing yardage – for all classes of competition – at the end of the 2006 regular season. Ray and Eric Watt also had been among the top quarterbacks – at least in total passing yards per game – in the whole state of Indiana.

And Nick’s high school team, Indianapolis Cardinal Ritter, had made it to the 2006 state high school championship game before losing to Sheridan in overtime.

The problem for Purichia and Ray at Franklin College, though, was that the Grizzlies had a top-notch quarterback, Chad Rupp, who was in his junior year – and second season as starter. (2008 photo of Rupp above is by Ralph Greenslade.)

In the second game of Rupp’s sophomore season, 2006, he had entered the game against intrastate rival and No. 22-ranked Wabash College in the second quarter, relieving Ty Fritz.

Rupp stayed in the game the rest of the way and led the Grizzlies to a stunning 45-38 overtime upset of the Little Giants. He completed 20 of 24 passes for 238 yards and four touchdowns, including the decisive one in the extra session. That performance earned him the job as starting quarterback the rest of the season. And, as it turned out, for the rest of his college career.

Only a year before that dramatic debut, things at Franklin were not as peachy for Rupp. He had starred at Evansville (Ind.) Memorial High School, and like many athletes confident about their skills when moving up to the next level, Rupp expected to do the same after he arrived at Franklin College in 2005.

But Rupp struggled in freshman-year practices and barely got into any games that first year. In a September 2008 interview for an article by Johnson County Daily Journal Sports Editor Rick Morwick, Rupp disclosed that he had contemplated leaving Franklin after his freshman season to enroll in a larger school, give up football altogether and focus on getting an academic degree. It was a refrain that would ring familiar at the campus in just two years.

Franklin College head coach Mike Leonard (shown at left in a 2010 Ralph Greenslade photo) said it wasn’t that the coaching staff did not feel Rupp had sufficient talent that 2005 season. Quite the opposite: “He really was good as a freshman,” Leonard told the Daily Journal’s Morwick, “but he just was behind some upperclassmen, and he was frustrated.”

Rupp did remain at Franklin, and coach Leonard credited the player’s father, Pete, with encouraging his son to stay with the Grizzlies.

Rupp led the Grizzlies to a 9-1 record in 2006 and followed that with consecutive Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference championships his junior and senior years, and each of those seasons was followed by trips to the NCAA Division III postseason tournament. The Grizzlies made it to the quarterfinals in 2008, the program’s historical apex in postseason play, beating teams ranked higher than them in the first two rounds. In the third round, the Grizzlies bowed out, losing to Wheaton College, a lower seed.

Rupp finished his Franklin College career holding or equaling several Franklin career, single-season and single-game passing records. His 576 yards of total offense, 527 passing yards and 41 pass completions – all against Otterbein in 2008 in the first round of the NCAA Division III postseason tournament – stand as school records today. There are quite a few others.

Purichia and Ray recognized Rupp’s greatness immediately and accepted that they would have to spend two years as backups, setting their sights on a fair shot to take over the starter’s job in their junior years, 2009, when Rupp would be gone.

Three games into the 2007 season, head coach Leonard gathered the team’s top four quarterbacks – junior Rupp, sophomore Coty Bragdon and freshmen Ray and Purichia – to talk about how he could get each of them more playing opportunities.

“We were all pretty similar,” Bragdon said. “Chad had the upper hand (having started the bulk of the 2006 season) and had more playing time. But everyone in the group knew the playbook well. We all got along and helped each other. We were a jovial bunch.”

Bragdon, who had quarterbacked his team at Eastern Hancock High School east of Indianapolis, recognized the situation that Leonard had discussed with the quarterbacks, so he went to coach Leonard and offered to join the team’s receiving corps, thinking that doing so might also get him more playing time.

“I knew the plays and the pass routes, so I thought it was a good way” to help solve the quarterback logjam, Bragdon said. Leonard accepted the offer and assigned Bragdon to practice with the team’s receivers, and that’s the position Bragdon would play – along with assignments on some special teams – most of the rest of his time at Franklin College.

An interesting exception came in the Grizzlies’ win over Rose-Hulman on Nov. 1, 2008, when on the Grizzlies’ second play of their first possession, Bragdon threw and completed a 36-yard pass – to none other than the team’s starting quarterback, Chad Rupp.

Bragdon said the unusual play had been devised and practiced the week leading up to the game. On second-and-3 from the Grizzlies’ own 22-yard line, Bragdon lined up as a receiver and got the ball on a pitch from Rupp on a jet sweep. Just as Bragdon reached the tackle spot on his run, he stopped, saw Rupp open and threw to the quarterback, who caught the pass.

“It almost worked to perfection,” Bragdon said with a chuckle. “I thought he was going to break it, but (he) ended up being tripped up” by a Rose-Hulman defender. Nevertheless, the play did pick up a lot of yardage, taking Franklin to the Rose-Human 42-yard line. Alas, the drive would end fruitless several plays later when the Grizzlies gambled and kept the offense on the field for a fourth-and-10 play, and Rupp’s pass was intercepted. But that proved to be just a momentary setback; the Grizzlies won the game, 42-7.

Ray said that throughout 2008, coach Leonard would try to assess whether Ray or Purichia might stand out as the preferred No. 2 quarterback (or the primary backup).

In practices, he said, “Coach Leonard would say, ‘OK, let’s see who’s going to be the backup’.” Leonard would then challenge Ray and Purichia to lead five plays each to see how each would fare.

“I completed five passes,” Ray said, “and when it was Nick’s turn, he had one pass knocked down, and threw another one incomplete. So I won that. Nick was quicker than me, and he could change direction better than me. But I think I was more accurate and made better decisions.”

2008 was also the year Ray and Bragdon decided to room together in Johnson-Dietz Hall (shown at right in a 2009 Joe Konz photo), the suite-style dormitory on campus that was built to replace 76-year-old Bryan Hall, which was destroyed in a fire in March 1985. They would remain roommates until Bragdon graduated in January 2010.

Bragdon noted that even though he and Kyle didn’t really know each other before meeting at Franklin, they had crossed paths. For years, Eastern Hancock and Indian Creek had each other on their annual high school football schedules as non-conference opponents. That included 2004, when Bragdon was a senior and Kyle Ray a sophomore, the only season both played on their varsity teams at the same time.

If that one game in 2004 (which Indian Creek won, 21-7) wasn’t enough for Bragdon to remember the Ray surname at Franklin College, two other things should have helped.

Kyle’s older brother, Justin, was in the same high school graduating class year (2005) as Bragdon, so Justin and Coty would have been on the field opposite each other in the annual Eastern Hancock-Indian Creek meetings as much as three times in their high school careers.

More likely, however, was that after he had graduated Eastern Hancock and began attending Franklin College, Coty would attend some of his younger brother Brett’s high school games. And in the Royals’ 2005 game at Trafalgar, Bragdon said, he distinctly remembers the Indian Creek public address announcer on several occasions touting “another big play by Kyle Ray,” who then was playing on defense for the Braves.

Bragdon said that announcer’s phrase returned to mind a few years later at Franklin College, when he eventually went to add Kyle’s phone number to his list of cell phone contacts. He used the moniker “Big Play Kyle Ray” for his teammate’s ID on his phone.  

Despite the “backup quarterback competitions” in Franklin College practices in 2008, Purichia and Ray saw limited action on the field that season, and even less the year before, although a look at final Franklin College statistics for those 2007 and 2008 seasons indicates that Purichia got slightly more opportunity on the field.

Purichia or Ray got into games when the Grizzlies had sizable leads and coach Leonard elected to bring Rupp to the sidelines. But it wasn’t enough to give either player any sustained experience.

It also didn’t give any of the coaches enough information to feel confident about one or the other as a starter after Rupp graduated and left campus. Purichia is No. 13 in Ralph Greenslade’s 2008 photo, celebrating with Bragdon (14) after the final score on a two-yard run in the aforementioned Rose-Hulman game.

So in 2009, the question of who would fill Rupp’s shoes loomed large when the football team assembled for preseason training camp. Sportswriters today might hype the situation as a “quarterback controversy” to generate interest and attention, but neither Ray nor Purichia – and certainly not coach Leonard – used such a term when discussing the situation.

But 2009 summer camp might have come too soon for Ray, who with his mother and siblings had suffered a huge personal loss at home just two months earlier: the death of Kyle’s father, Rob Ray. College roommate Bragdon felt that Kyle’s grief was partly responsible for what he said he observed of his friend’s play, not just at summer camp but through most of the 2009 season.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In late 2004, according to Karen Ray, her husband, Rob, started experiencing some discomfort. Early the following year, he caught and struggled with a cold, and soon after that, he came down with what appeared to be a case of bronchitis, which she said he had caught from oldest son Justin. Soon after that, Rob battled other health issues such as shoulder discomfort and inexplicable weight loss.

Rob finally visited his doctor in February 2005, and in March he consulted a gastroenterologist. Tests were done, including a colonoscopy, and initial results showed nothing of significance, Karen said. So doctors did a CAT scan and ultrasound, and the latter detected a mass on Rob’s liver.

The Ray family and some friends – including Kolby Harrell – went to Destin, Fla., to enjoy some R&R that same month. In the few days that Rob and Karen stayed in Florida on that trip, Kolby recalled, Rob mentioned more than once that he was experiencing some unusual pain.

The Ray family photo above was used in a Christmas card and bore the greeting, “From our team to yours. Merry Christmas!” From left, Karen, Justin, Leslie, Kyle and Rob.

Rob and Karen flew back to Indiana early so Rob could undergo a biopsy, a procedure that was supposed to be handled on an outpatient basis. But complications required that he be admitted, a stay that lasted several days, Karen said.

The results of the biopsy were not available when Rob finally was released, but he hadn’t been home very long when, while driving to have breakfast at a restaurant one morning, he got a call with the biopsy results. It turned out that the mass was verified as a rare form of neuroendocrine cancer, Karen said.

“Rob was very active. He didn’t drink alcohol,” Karen said. “There was a tiny spot on his pancreas that had moved to the liver.” It was a type of cancer that was “so random.”

The Rays consulted an oncologist, who had Rob try chemotherapy and different treatments, including a drug therapy trial.

After a difficult first few months of 2005, Rob had lost a noticeable amount of weight, but he was feeling better by the time son Justin graduated high school that spring. He was able to work the next couple of tax seasons, Karen said. Their oncologist told them that he’d had a patient with a situation similar to Rob’s, “and he got six (more) years,” she said. “We got four.”

During those four years, Rob never quibbled or complained, Karen said. He continued to work and join Karen in attending Justin and Kyle’s games at Indian Creek High School the rest of 2005 and ’06, and then Kyle’s games at Franklin College in 2007 and ’08.

Leslie Ray said her parents would consult her periodically during that difficult period because Leslie had obtained a doctorate in pharmacy from Purdue University in 2007, after which she went through additional pharmacist training and medical residencies in Florida and Chicago. Her knowledge of pharmaceuticals gave the Rays a resource for information and topics to raise in conversations with Rob’s doctors and specialists.

In early 2009, the cancer took firm control, and treatments were no longer working. Rob battled it to the end, which came the morning of June 8, 2009 – 2½ months before Kyle’s junior year began at Franklin College. Rob died at Community Hospital South in Indianapolis.

The death affected the whole Ray family, of course, but Kyle took it particularly hard; Rob had been Kyle’s idol and emotional rock.

“Rob had always been there for Kyle,” Karen said. “Kyle loved the quarterback position, and wanted to be like his dad.”

“My dad was a man of faith,” Kyle said, and in his father’s last days, “he had every reason to play victim, and never did. He died taking everything in spirit. He never was defeated. The day before he died, we were all in his (hospital) room praying for a miracle. But he was ready to accept what was ahead of him.”

Claire Freeman, whom Kyle was dating at this time, remembers Rob Ray like so many others did – a kind, loving and caring family man who had a hardy, infectious laugh.

“I absolutely loved him,” she said. “He and I had a wonderful relationship. I often joked that he loved me more than he loved Kyle. He was full of life, a man of God and a family guy. He loved his nieces and nephews so much. I often wonder how he would have been so in love with his grandkids. He was just an awesome, awesome guy.”  

In the weeks after Rob’s death, Kyle told himself he’d use his father’s inspirational journey to help carry him past any troubles and challenges that lie ahead.

Unfortunately, Kyle’s ride for the next nine months or so would be bumpy, dispiriting and weighted with adversity. 

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Footnotes: 

1 - As of 2022, the Seagulls have won at least 17 championships since the team was founded in 1983. Today, the Seagulls are based in the city of Narashino, just across Tokyo Bay from the city of Tokyo. The X-League was founded in 1971 as the Japan American Football League and changed its name to the X-League in 1997, the year before Leonard’s last stint (for one season) with the Seagulls.

Tomorrow in Chapter 11:  No Easy Decision

Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons": 

Introduction

Chapter 1: 'We Stood Out'

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 8: New Teammates

Chapter 9: Farewell, Levi ... and Welcome, Pup!

CHAPTER 6A Moonlight Graham moment

In a 2006 preseason interview with the Daily Journal newspaper in Johnson County, Ind., Indian Creek High School head football coach Mike Gillin said that he didn't think the Braves' offense would be as pass-oriented that season as it had been in the years with his son Casey and Matt Rogers behind center.

That wasn’t a swipe at incoming starting quarterback Kyle Ray; it was because, he said, in 2006 the Braves had a proven running back in junior Justin Cave.

“We’re going to really try and establish the run a little bit more even though we still look to throw the ball 25 to 30 times a game,” Gillin said. “We’ll try to put the ball in Justin Cave’s hands a little bit more.”

With Rogers at quarterback in 2005, Cave had rushed for a team-high 547 yards and eight touchdowns, so it was not surprising that coach Gillin thought Cave – who would have three returning starters from the offensive line (Mike Elmore, Evan Lattimore and Jared Waltz) blocking for him again – loomed as a major offensive weapon for the Braves in 2006.

Gillin told the Daily Journal he was confident that Kyle Ray could lead the offense. There was even more optimism for Indian Creek to succeed in securing its sixth consecutive winning season: Returning were eight starters on defense – including Ray at safety in addition to starting at quarterback. Experience is the defense’s top strength, Gillin said.

Finally, the team had a lot of returning seniors, a distinction the Martinsville Reporter-Times featured several weeks into the season with an article published Oct. 12, accompanied by a group photo (reprinted below with permission from the Reporter-Times). In the article, coach Gillin saluted the group for not only giving the team great depth, “but they have come to work every day with great attitudes, and they lead by example. Whether they are vocal leaders or silent leaders, they know what we want to get accomplished, and they work together to get it done.”

Seniors on the 2006 Indian Creek High School football team were (bottom row, left to right): Drew Hogue, Kyle Kuntz, Kyle Baird, Caleb Raley, Kyle Ray, Kyle Horton, Evan Lattimore, Chuck Phipps and Devin Smith. Back row, same order: Mike Elmore, Preston Pameijer, Zac Poindexter, Jeff Smeltzer, Jared Waltz, Cory Baxter, Michael Jordan and Kolby Harrell. 

That 2006 team ended up with a respectable record (8-3), losing only two regular-season games, one to Johnson County non-conference rival Whiteland, a Class 4A school, 33-21, and the other to Mid-Indiana Football Conference foe Triton Central, 30-7.

Caleb Raley, who had been a top receiver for Matt Rogers the previous year, remained a top passing target for his longtime friend Kyle Ray in 2006 as well. Caleb pointed to his familiarity with Kyle from the many years they threw the ball together as kids all the way through middle and high schools. Those repetitions served the combo – and the team – well that season.

Ray said the loss to Triton Central was one of the toughest for the team that year because both teams entered the game ranked in the state polls, and – most importantly – the game decided the conference championship.

Ray and the Braves started the 2006 season auspiciously, using a stifling defense to overwhelm hapless fellow Johnson County school and conference foe Edinburgh, 76-0. The Braves scored touchdowns on interception and punt returns, and the offense was gifted short fields most of the game, enabling the offense to amass 300 total yards – 156 on the ground and 144 in the air. Cave gained 90 yards on eight carries rushing, and Ray completed 12 of 16 passes, including four for touchdowns. Coach Gillin took out the starters in the second half when the rout became certain.

Reality check time came the following week in the loss to Whiteland, which stopped the Indian Creek running game, limiting the Braves to just 70 yards on 47 carries, less than two yards per carry. The Warriors’ offense, meanwhile, ran rampant with the ball, amassing 337 yards on 45 carries – led by Elliott Dutra’s 178 yards on 23 carries and four touchdowns. Whiteland’s fifth touchdown also came on a run.

Ray completed 19 of 37 passes for 247 yards and two touchdowns.

Following Whiteland, the Braves had five easy wins in a row. The first, 29-8 over Eastern Hancock, avenged a loss to the Royals the previous year. Ray was 23 of 27 for 202 yards and a touchdown and was 17 for 18 for 136 yards in the first half alone, exploiting the Royals with an effective short-pass game.

Cave scored three rushing touchdowns and gained 112 yards on 20 carries. The last touchdown was set up by Ray’s longest pass of the night, a 43-yarder to Cory Baxter on a critical fourth-down play. It was Baxter’s only reception of the contest. Sophomore Zac Tharpe was Ray’s top receiver in the game, hauling in nine passes for 79 yards, including one for 10 yards and a touchdown in the first quarter.

The following week, the Braves notched another vengeance win, 28-18 over Brebeuf Jesuit, which had thrashed Indian Creek 56-7 in 2005. But the victory didn’t come easily.

Indian Creek played a mistake-filled first half and trailed 10-7 when teams went to the locker rooms at the halfway point. But Justin Cave had another big night – 171 yards rushing on 29 carries – and Indian Creek as a team had 231 yards rushing. Kyle Ray even got into the act, gaining 58 yards on 14 carries, and he kept Brebeuf off balance with his passes, completing 14 of 20 for 172 yards and two touchdowns.

Indian Creek struggled again early the following week, trailing Brown County 6-0 after the first quarter. But Ray and Cave again rose to the occasion. Ray completed 18 of 23 passes for 259 yards and four touchdowns, including two long ones in the second quarter, a 39-yarder to Kyle Baird and a 56-yarder to Tharpe. Cave gained 153 yards on 20 carries and scored on runs of 22 and nine yards, in a 52-14 conquest.

Next was a 59-6 homecoming weekend drubbing of conference foe Milan that was interrupted by a rain deluge that suspended play for 90 minutes in the first quarter. At that point, Ray had already thrown touchdown passes of 83 yards (this coming on the first play from scrimmage), and 77 and 19 yards, and the Braves were leading 21-6. The delay didn’t help Milan.

When play resumed, Indian Creek resumed the onslaught. When it was over, Ray had thrown for 335 yards and five touchdowns, the latter tying for third best in school history.

Next up on the schedule was 4-2 North Decatur, and the Braves tallied three touchdowns quickly, two on Ray TD passes, and won 35-6. Ray completed 22 of 25 passes for 311 yards and three TDs. Cave gained 120 yards on 17 carries.

The Braves then traveled to Triton Central. Going in, Indian Creek had lost just one conference game in head coach Mike Gillin’s six seasons and had won four of the past five conference football titles.

After a scoreless first quarter, the Braves tallied first with 4:38 left on the clock in the second quarter when Ray threw 17 yards to Kyle Baird on an end zone corner route to go up 7-0. The Braves were fortunate to get that much out of the drive. They had started on their 5-yard line then stalled, forcing them to punt. But game officials flagged Triton Central for running into the punter, giving Indian Creek a second chance to get more out of the drive.

Ray took advantage, leading his team downfield on 16 plays, ending with the scoring strike to Baird. Unfortunately, those were the Braves’ only points of the night.

The Tigers’ Ted Stokes threw 44 yards to Justin Ratliff with 1:29 left in the half to pull Triton Central to within 7-6. In the second half, Stokes scored on runs of 13 and 26 yards and gained 155 rushing yards on 31 carries for the game.

Ray threw 41 times, but completed only 19 for 179 yards and had one intercepted. Cave, who was the county’s second-leading rusher coming into the game, was held to 46 yards on 17 carries, or an average of 2.7 yards per rush.

The Braves were 6-2 going into their final regular-season game on Oct. 13 against South Decatur, but it would not be an ordinary game – or week.

On the day before the game, everyone at Indian Creek High School learned that sophomore Emily Downey, a member of the Braves’ girls tennis team who was crowned 2006 Indian Creek Homecoming Princess, had died of injuries from an ATV accident in September.

“I walked into the locker room (on game day), and it was just quiet,” Ray told correspondent Joe Skeel, who wrote the game story for the Daily Journal. “We all cared about her. Some of us didn’t know her as well as others, but when you lose a classmate, it’s hard. We just wanted to come out and play for her.”

Perhaps inspired by the memory of Emily, the Indian Creek aerial game picked up against South Decatur in a 30-15 win. Ray threw 31 passes, completing 15 for 198 yards and three touchdowns. He had just one pass intercepted.

Indian Creek opened IHSAA Class 2A sectional play with a 7-2 record and a trip to Lawrenceburg, the same place where Kyle’s father, Rob, saw his season and high school football career end in 1975 just a game short of playing for the state championship.

At Lawrenceburg, the 2006 Braves scored early and held a 21-7 lead at halftime before breaking open the game in the second half behind two touchdowns by senior Kyle Kuntz, one on a 13-yard pass from Ray and the other by returning a punt blocked by teammate Brandon Collins, a play that coach Gillin said sealed the victory.

Indian Creek’s Justin Cave led all rushers with 120 yards, putting him over the 1,000-yard mark for the season. Ray completed 16 of 21 passes for 235 yards and three touchdowns in the 42-7 triumph.

Indian Creek hosted Brownstown Central in the second round of the sectionals. The matchup was not an enviable one, given Indian Creek’s poor results against the Jackson County school in recent years, all in sectional competition. But it was a chance to end a losing streak to an opponent that had become a thorn in Indian Creek’s sectional championship aspirations.

Brownstown Central had won eight of the two schools’ nine previous meetings and had knocked Indian Creek out of sectionals the past three seasons. Going into the game, the teams looked evenly matched on paper. Indian Creek (8-2) averaged 37.0 points per game and gave up 13.7 points a game; Brownstown Central (8-1) scored 34.8 points a game and gave up 10.7 per game. This also would be a chance for Kyle Ray to help his school claim another bit of revenge in the 2006 season.

Brownstown Central player Daymond Reynolds, who would join Kyle Ray at the same college the following season, recalls the game “very vividly.” By this time, after his school had met Indian Creek so many times in the sectionals, he explained, Brownstown Central – whose team name, Braves, was the same as Indian Creek’s – considered its Johnson County opponent a sectional rival, even though Reynolds’ school had held the upper hand in almost all of the previous encounters.

“We were the Braves, and they were the Braves. We kind of considered it a competition to see who the real Braves were,” Reynolds said with a chuckle.

Another non-enviable factor this time around, one that turned out to be considerable, was Mother Nature. On game day, Oct. 27, it rained throughout the day and into the night in much of Indiana, and sometimes those showers were heavy. At kickoff time, the Indian Creek field was so drenched that puddles had formed on the grass turf, and the downpour did not let up during the contest.

How bad was the downpour? Game officials were wiping the football before each play, placing it on the turf only as the offenses broke huddle and approached the line of scrimmage. And despite doing that, said Brownstown’s Reynolds, conditions were so bad that when officials finally did put the ball on the “ground” to begin the next play, mud and water levels on the turf were higher than the ball itself, instantly returning the pigskin to its slippery, slimy state.

“It was a swamp,” Reynolds said succinctly, and Kyle Ray concurred: “I have never played in a game where it was that hard to throw a pass,” Ray said. “I couldn’t grip the ball. Our field was awful. It was a Mud Bowl.”

Compounding the misery were temperatures, which were in the mid-40s at the game’s start, and they would fall slowly through the night.

The game didn’t begin well for the host school. Brownstown recovered an Indian Creek fumble on the latter’s first offensive play, and things got only worse from there.

The wet weather crippled Indian Creek’s aerial attack, enabling the Brownstown Central defense to sharpen its focus on stopping the running game. The host school was limited to 63 yards rushing and 40 yards passing, and Brownstown intercepted two Kyle Ray passes.

In the third quarter, as an Indian Creek ball carrier attempted to find yardage outside on a play deep in its own territory, Daymond Reynolds and a Brownstown teammate hit the Indian Creek ball carrier for a tackle, and Reynolds saw the ball come free and drop to the ground. Reynolds said he immediately released his tackle, scooped up the ball and ran it 15 yards for a touchdown, his first and only touchdown as a high school player. It gave Brownstown a 19-0 lead. (Reynolds provided his contemporary photo at right.)

The Indian Creek Braves might have had a better chance if they had been able to turn to their usually strong running game to counter problems with the aerial attack – or at least to balance the mix of offensive plays. Indian Creek’s rushing game had done well most of the time during the regular season behind Justin Cave, who had gained 1,034 yards and scored 12 touchdowns up to that point in the season.

But Cave was not allowed to play that night; school officials were disciplining him for violating a team rule that put the use of tobacco off limits for athletes playing interscholastic sports.

“It was Friday morning – the day of the game – when we all learned about Justin,” Ray said. “He was a good back, a physical back. I think he would’ve gotten some tough yards for us.”

The Brownstown defense was well aware of Cave’s absence on the Indian Creek offense. In his interview 16 years after the game, Daymond Reynolds volunteered that detail before it ever came up in a question.

“Every time we played Indian Creek,” Reynolds said, “they’d throw the ball 50 times a game and average 300-some yards. But that night, they weren’t able to finish off the game, really.”

Kolby Harrell agreed that Cave would have made a difference to his team: “If Justin Cave plays, I think we’d have had a chance to win. It would have so changed our offensive approach. But we couldn’t throw the ball.”

As much difficulty as Indian Creek was having, Brownstown wasn’t finding things a lot easier.

“We had a wing-T offense, and even our misdirection didn’t work because we couldn’t do anything with speed because of the slop,” said Reynolds, who played center on offense and end on defense for the visitors. “So we just put in a bigger fullback and basically ran power and dive.”

After a scoreless first quarter, one of those Brownstown power-and-dive plays worked in the second quarter when senior Levi Shiner, who had missed several games earlier in the season with bone bruise and knee injuries, broke through on a 37-yard gallop for a touchdown. That seemed to give Brownstown the spark it needed to stick to the game plan and make it work.

After Reynolds’ touchdown on the fumble recovery in the third quarter, Brownstown scored twice more, both on Teddy Stucker runs. The first, in the third quarter, was for six yards, the second, in the fourth period, was for 24 yards, putting the visitors on top, 32-0.

Despite several Indian Creek lopsided victories earlier in the season, Kolby Harrell still hadn’t seen any live action in his high school football career. Then, late in the final quarter against Brownstown Central, with a losing outcome now certain, several Indian Creek players, including Kyle Ray, approached head coach Mike Gillin and asked him if he would put Kolby into the game – and maybe even give him a chance to carry the ball.

Gillin readily agreed. In fact, Gillin was preparing to send in an offense consisting of all seniors to toast their accomplishments at the end of their four-year ride together. So the coach called Kolby over and told him he was going in with the offense at running back.

The assignment was a shocker to Harrell, who for three years had practiced only with the varsity’s defensive and special teams units. He had never practiced with the offense, much less gotten any repetitions carrying the ball.

Indeed, it loomed as a kind of “Moonlight Graham” moment.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, born in Fayetteville, N.C., in November 1877, was a professional left-hand-hitting baseball player whose career in the pro game, from 1900-08, was spent almost entirely in the minor leagues, splitting time with nine different teams over that period.

In 1905, when he was with the New York Giants’ Class B Minor League affiliate in Binghamton, N.Y., the parent Giants summoned Graham to the Major League club. After languishing on the Giants’ bench for several games, Graham finally got into a game against Brooklyn on June 29. But his entire live-action Big-League experience consisted of playing two innings of defense in right field – recording no putouts or assists.¹

That novelty was a key sidebar in the 1982 W.P. Kinsella novel Shoeless Joe and in Field of Dreams, the 1989 motion picture adaptation of Kinsella’s book.

Graham was on deck to hit next in the top of the ninth inning when the batter ahead of him made the Giants’ final out. The Giants won, 11-1. His appearance in the outfield, however, did make Graham eligible for inclusion in the Major League Baseball Encyclopedia, widely regarded as the sport’s Bible.

Graham began attending medical school while in the minor leagues, and as noted above, he completed his training at the University of Maryland the same year the Giants called him up to the big leagues. 

He played with the university’s football and baseball teams in 1904 and ’05 and obtained his medical license in ’06, upon which he began practicing medicine in Chisholm, Minn., during baseball’s offseason. When he ended his baseball career in 1908, he returned to Chisholm to work full time and served as the school district’s official physician from 1909-59. He died in Chisholm at the age of 87 in August 1965.

According to various sources on the Internet, how Graham got his nickname “Moonlight” is not known for certain. It is speculated that it was because, according to his medical school yearbook, he enjoyed moonlight walks on the beach during his years at the University of Maryland. Or perhaps it was simply because he “moonlighted” as a doctor in his last years of playing Minor League baseball.

Curiously, news articles in his baseball playing days referred to him by the nickname “Deerfoot” because of his speed on the base paths.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After coach Gillin sent Kolby Harrell and other seniors onto the field for Indian Creek’s final offensive possession of its 2006 sectional game against Brownstown Central, the seniors huddled for what would prove to be the last play. 

Quarterback Kyle Ray called his buddy Kolby’s number to take a handoff on a draw play. Ray quickly coached Kolby on how he was to move on the play: He simply had to step slightly right when Kyle came back to him for the handoff, then take off running when the ball was securely in Kolby’s grasp.

“We could have just taken a knee, but they wanted to give me a chance to experience” live action, Harrell said.

When the offense came to the line of scrimmage to run the play, with Harrell hunched and set in the backfield, Harrell overheard the Brownstown Central middle linebacker – Daymond Reynolds identified him as Dustin Allman – bark out an alert to teammates: “Watch for the draw!” 

Harrell said he thought to himself, “Oh, boy … ”

When the center snapped the ball to Ray, Harrell paused in his tracks as he was supposed to on a draw play. But Kyle said Kolby neglected to also step right, and there was an awkward convergence moment with Kyle during the ball exchange.

But Kolby hung onto the ball and took off running to the right as hard and fast as he could. He said he managed to gain five yards (the game stats in local newspapers the following day confirmed the yardage gain) on his burst before being brought down on a hard tackle – by the alert-shrilling Brownstown middle linebacker.

Ray said the moment was therapeutic for him because he was able to see his good friend and great teammate finally get a moment to shine. “He went all those years without playing and never complaining, and to see him get a run like that … I tell you, I was grateful.”

Harrell described that moment as every bit the thrill you might have expected for someone who was getting his first taste of varsity action by running with the ball on the last play of the last game in his high school career. Plus, he had been given the handoff from a longtime friend, a guy with whom he had shared so many good times in the years leading up to that point. And although the game was now over, for that brief moment, the spotlight on that wet, soggy swamp of a field was on Kolby Harrell.

Immediately after Harrell hit the wet turf on the tackle, senior center Mike Elmore walked up to Harrell, saw tears in Kolby’s eyes and asked him if he was all right.

Harrell said he told Elmore that yes, he was just fine. He explained that the tears were tears of joy. What he didn’t tell Elmore was that in those few seconds, beginning when he jogged onto the field for the last play until he fell to the turf on the tackle, he had been overwhelmed by emotions and memories.

He had thought of his team’s 17 seniors, many of whom had played together every year since Bantam ball, and how this was the last time this amalgam of football talent would play together as a high school unit on the same gridiron of competition.

His flashbacks went back a few years to eighth-grade games, when Kolby was keeping team stats and how Kyle Horton, one of this year’s seniors, engaged Kolby in a playful, oft-reprised routine along the sideline. After a certain play, Horton would ask Kolby if he had given Horton credit for the last tackle, even on occasions when he didn’t make the tackle. Kolby said other guys noticed Horton’s stunt and started doing it, too, just to see if they could get away with it. Or they did it just to get a piece of that fun interaction with the good-natured Harrell.

Even though he didn’t get onto the field to play that eighth-grade season, Kolby recalled that the eighth-grade football team’s coach, Rob Ray, his friend Kyle’s father, gave him a team jersey at the end of the season, a token of gratitude that Kolby truly appreciated.

Teddy Stucker led a 279-yard Brownstown Central rushing game by gaining 131 yards on 15 carries and the two touchdowns. The visitors had 12 first downs to Indian Creek’s six.

And Ray would end his high school football career completing only seven of 17 passes in the game. Ray said coach Gillin tried to console him afterward. “He told me he didn’t think he’d have been able to throw well in those weather conditions either,” Kyle said. “I appreciated that.”

Brownstown’s dominance over Indian Creek wouldn’t end in that 2006 sectional; it would continue for the next two sectionals as well.

Before leaving the Indian Creek campus the night of the muddy 2006 sectional round game, several victorious Brownstown Central players celebrated by enjoying what Mother Nature had handed them. 

“They were doing belly-flops and baseball slides” in the muddy pools on the field, said Daymond Reynolds. “I remember one of our sophomore starting safeties took off running, and I bet he slid over 10 yards on his chest.”

Such stunts resulted in mud reaching at least one place of the Brownstown players’ gear that might have escaped getting fully soiled during the game – shoulder pads. Reynolds said that after the mud-slide antics, participating team members stepped into the showers with their pads still on, using the water to clean off the gear.

Kyle Ray said the 32-0 loss to Brownstown Central – the first time an Indian Creek team had been shut out in Mike Gillin’s tenure as head coach at the school – contributed to what was for him a depressing season aftermath. And he said a mid-game distraction along the sideline made matters a little more unsettling for him and teammates.

Justin Cave’s father showed up on the host school’s side of the field and tried to give coach Gillin an earful of his opinion about the pre-game disciplinary action against his son, Ray said. Security staff and some physically large assistant coaches stepped between the angry father and coach Gillin, preventing an even uglier scene, he added.

The loss and lousy weather of that last game aside, Kyle Ray had enjoyed a remarkable senior season, his only year as the starting quarterback for Indian Creek. He finished the year completing 180 out of 280 passes for 2,298 yards and 28 touchdowns and had only seven passes intercepted, among the lowest on the state’s Top 20 list of quarterbacks of all classes as ranked by the Indiana High School Athletic Association by yards per game. Ray’s 208.9 average yards per game ranked ninth at all class levels and was tops for all Class 2A schools.

According to the IHSAA, Ray’s total yardage and passing TDs were second only to Fort Wayne Harding’s Devin Dominguez’s 2,711 and 30 TDs in Class 2A. At Indian Creek, Ray today ranks high in multiple passing records, despite only one full season at quarterback, according to data kept and provided by coach Gillin. As of the end of 2021, Kyle was:

*** Sixth in school history in career touchdown passes (with 30).

*** Tied with Matt Rogers for fourth in TD passes in a season (28). (Note: An article in the Martinsville Reporter-Times published in the days before the final game against Brownstown Central said Kyle had only 27 touchdown passes that season.)

*** Tied for fourth among the school’s longest pass-reception plays from scrimmage (an 83-yard pass to Kyle Baird against Milan in 2006).

*** Eleventh in career passing attempts (311), seventh in single-season passing attempts (263) and tied for fifth in passing attempts in a game (41). (Note: The aforementioned article in the Reporter-Times said Kyle had attempted 263 passes in 2006 before the final game against Brownstown Central. He would throw 17 more passes in the sectional loss).

*** Among the school’s top 10 in career and season passing yardage with 2,585 (ranks eighth) and 2,251 (in 2006, ranking him sixth), respectively. Coincidentally, the 2,585-yard career passing mark stands just ahead of the 2,305 passing yards gained by his father, Rob (Class of ’76). (Note: According to the Reporter-Times article cited previously, Kyle had 2,301 passing yards in 2006 entering the sectional championship game against Brownstown Central. He picked up 45 more passing yards in that final game).

Asked what lasting impressions he has from his years on the Indian Creek varsity, Kolby Harrell took about 6 seconds or so to think. He rattled off a montage of memories: Two-a-day practices at the end of summer … the simple walk to the practice field every day … the ramp-up of excitement before the start of the season … loud music playing in the locker room to energize players before a game. (The song Thunderstruck by AC/DC was on the playlist. “It was a tradition.”) … How in the relatively rural Johnson County community, it was not unusual for someone on the team or in the school to drive to practice with their vehicle loaded with watermelons to share as refreshment for all team members during breaks …

Then Kolby found more fluency.

“Football, for me, a lot of the time, was just hanging out on the sidelines,” he said. “We wanted to win a state championship. That was always the goal. … A lot of these kids played together their whole lives, and so (being a part of that) still stands out as special. Our community is so small that everybody in town knows everybody else. Football was a way for me to start learning how to wrap my arms around this small town and be part of something special, even though we were blown out by Brownstown Central.”

In late November, the Associated Press announced its all-state football teams for Indiana. In Indian Creek’s Class 2A, one Brave made the main team – Evan Lattimore as a defensive lineman. Three teammates were listed as honorable mentions – quarterback Kyle Ray, wide receiver Zac Tharpe and linebacker Kyle Horton.

 

In a family photo above, Kyle posed with his father on the night of high school graduation.

Ray said coaches from Franklin College, an NCAA Division III school, had come to see him play during his senior year at Indian Creek. He also said Franklin head football coach Mike Leonard attended one of the Braves’ basketball games in 2007, and in a meeting after that game, Leonard told Ray he’d like the athlete to play football at Franklin.

“Franklin seemed real interested in me, plus my dad went there,” Ray said, so the Grizzlies had that working in their favor.

But Franklin wasn’t the only school calling on him. Ray said coaches from the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), let him know they wanted him to consider coming to their school.

Ray went to the St. Francis campus for an official recruiting visit that winter. While he was there, St. Francis threw him for a loop – in a good way – by offering him a partial scholarship to attend and play ball there. NAIA schools, unlike Division II and III schools in the NCAA, are allowed to offer athletes scholarship money to offset the costs of their education.

“I said ‘Whoa,’ ” Kyle said. St. Francis’ scholarship of about $13,000 a year would cover more than half of the $25,000 annual tuition at the time, he said, and being a good student in high school, he probably would have qualified to receive academic scholarship money as well.

“It was the cheapest option for me by far,” he said, and it would have helped his parents and him deal with the high cost of a college education at a private school. Franklin College, also a private institution, was much closer to home for him, but it was a member of the smallest division of the NCAA. The affordability of St. Francis loomed as a significant deal-breaker for Kyle and his parents.

“My parents were very proud of me, and I felt so proud and excited to have been offered a scholarship to play football. We just weren’t expecting that.”

Kyle noted that St. Francis had reached the NAIA postseason championship game the previous year, losing to No. 2 Sioux Falls, 23-19. (In fact, the Cougars had made it to the championship game in each of the three previous years, losing each time. They would return to the title game in 2016 and 2017, winning both times). Furthermore, the Cougars had won or shared their conference championship for eight consecutive seasons, and in the process, lost only one league game. So Kyle would be joining a program very much on the rise.

St. Francis’ scholarship offer and team success story were enough to sway Ray in his decision: He would go to college in Fort Wayne, beginning with the fall 2007 semester. He gave the news to Franklin coach Mike Leonard, whom Ray said accepted the news graciously. “He was classy,” Ray said.

Before starting any classes that fall, Ray attended the St. Francis summer football training camp in Fort Wayne. Ray said it didn’t take long before he started to have misgivings about the decision – and about being so far from home.

“I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Ray said. “I felt I wasn’t in the right place. I told my parents, and my dad drove up, and I told all the St. Francis coaches I was going to transfer to Franklin. They were classy about it (too).”

After making his decision to leave the Cougars for Franklin College, Kyle Ray called Mike Leonard to tell him about his desire to come to Franklin after all and make sure the coach still wanted him. Ray said Leonard welcomed the decision.

When he got to Franklin, starting quarterback Chad Rupp was in his junior year, so Kyle knew he would have to wait a while to get his chance to move up as a starter. But Kyle had done this waiting stuff before – three years behind Matt Rogers at Indian Creek High School.

It was not anything new to him.

________________________________________________________________________________

Footnote:

1 - The real-life story of Archibald “Moonlight” Graham was slightly altered for the sake of Hollywood drama in the motion picture. While the movie states he appeared for a single half-inning and never touched the ball, historical research by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and verified box scores show that he actually played two full innings in right field for the New York Giants that June day in 1905. During those two innings, there was a Brooklyn base hit to the outfield, meaning Graham may have had a brief opportunity to field the ball in play, even if newspaper play-by-plays didn’t officially record him making a putout or an assist. The film also shifted the timeline — claiming his game occurred on the final day of the 1922 season — and suggested he immediately left baseball for medical school. In reality, Graham had already graduated from medical school before his Major League debut in 1905, and he continued playing in the Minor Leagues for three more seasons through 1908 before fully pivoting to his long career as a town doctor in Chisholm, Minn.

Tomorrow in Chapter 7: 'Clearly the Best' Small-School Teams in Indiana’ 

Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons": 

Introduction

Chapter 1: 'We Stood Out'

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 4Like father, like son

The sprawling grounds encompassing Indian Creek Elementary, Intermediate, Middle and Senior High Schools in the town of Trafalgar in southern Indiana are in direct view of motorists southbound on State Road 135 when the road reaches its junction with SR 252, a T-intersection.

The schools are in the Nineveh¹-Hensley-Jackson United School Corp., named for the three townships it serves (Nineveh and Hensley in Johnson County, Jackson in Morgan County). Indian Creek is the name of a stream that flows through each of those three townships. 

The N-H-J grounds are large enough to include all the necessary facilities for a school system’s sports teams, including a football field surrounded by a running track. There also are baseball and softball diamonds, tennis courts and several practice fields, as well as plenty of parking spaces.

Indian Creek High School launched its football program in 1970, and not long after that, Rob Ray began a three-year stint playing quarterback for the Braves’ teams. It was on that same gridiron, a generation later, that Rob’s sons, Justin and Kyle, would play football for the Braves as well.

After high school, Rob played wide receiver at Franklin College, where his girlfriend, Karen Ford, two years behind him at Indian Creek, would come to see him play.

On June 1, 1980, just a few days after Rob graduated from college, he and Karen were married at the Richardson Chapel on the campus of Franklin College. (A family photo taken on the day of the wedding appears at left.) Two weeks after that, Rob started a job as a certified public accountant at what was then Ernst & Whinney in Indianapolis.

Before long, Rob took a job with the accounting firm Woodbury & Co. in Franklin, the seat of Johnson County. Franklin is a half-hour’s drive south of Indianapolis on I-65, but it was much closer than Indianapolis to the couple’s home in rural western Johnson County.

The Rays' family expanded to include daughter Leslie, born in March 1983, then sons Justin and Kyle, in June 1986 and February 1989, respectively. Justin recalled that when he and Kyle were very young, his mother dressed the brothers in like clothing, fooling some people into thinking they were twins.

Karen said Rob shared his sports knowledge with all his children, and the two parents gave them strong support in their athletic and other life endeavors.

“Rob was always hands-on when they played ball in the yard,” said Karen, adding that Rob liked all sports, but football was his favorite.

Leslie recalls playing baseball in the yard with her father and brothers. “Dad would pitch, and he gave me endless chances” to hit the ball. So many, in fact, that while the wait didn’t bother her father, known for his extraordinary patience, it did annoy brother Kyle, shown as a toddler at right in a family photo.

“He’d say, ‘Hit the dang ball!’,” she said of Kyle. Something like that might have scared away kids who knew they were not as athletic as their siblings, a perception that Leslie accepted about herself. But she played on.

Leslie would join her parents attending her brothers’ baseball, basketball and football games later on. And while the boys competed in those games, Leslie ran off and played nearby with friends, which she felt was just as much fun as whatever thrills her brothers were enjoying in their athletic pursuits.

That first Ray family home in western Johnson County, along State Road 44 in southern Union Township, between Bargersville and Trafalgar, had a large front yard and an above-ground pool in the backyard. Rob and Karen bought the home in 1981, a year after their marriage. (Another early family photo at right shows Kyle with Rob.)

Rob’s charisma – and his heart of gold – appealed to friends of the Ray siblings. The youths gravitated to Rob in those many days in the backyard pool, Leslie said.

“Dad was always in the pool, and our friends would always be hanging onto him,” she said. Her mother, Karen, confirmed: “He was a kid magnet!”

Leslie went on to say that her father was always a generous person, something that became evident when she and her brothers’ friends joined the Rays on various fun outings.

“A friend of mine freshman year would talk about ‘The Bank of Rob,’ ” Leslie said. “He’d pay for everybody.”

Her brothers joined in when she and her friends wanted to play Boxcar Children, an activity that involved re-enacting or improvising their own versions of stories from the pages of the children’s book series of the same name by author Gertrude Chandler Warner. 

The books follow the adventures of four orphaned children who make a home in an abandoned boxcar in the forest, eventually meeting up with a kind and wealthy grandfather. They don’t perceive him as kind at first, though; it takes a while for them to warm to him. The grandfather eventually invites the children to live with him, and he has the boxcar moved into the backyard of his home so the youngsters can use it as a playhouse.

“My brothers were not big readers,” Leslie said. “But they would come along with us when we played Boxcar Children. … Or maybe we made them,” she added with a chuckle. 

Rob Ray was involved, too, when the boys started playing Bantam football while still living near Bargersville. Kyle said he and Justin played in the Indian Creek program in Trafalgar, where their parents had attended school. Rob and Karen posed with Kyle in his Bantam league uniform in a family photo at left.

Bantam is a program that encompasses independent leagues in which youths learn about the sport, strive to improve skills and compete in games. 

Bantam’s youth-oriented development goal is similar to that of Pop Warner football, the program in which Eric Watt participated in northwest Indiana at about the same time.

Karen said other parents noticed Rob’s skillful teaching manner with youths in Bantam football. After his sons grew out of competition in that organization and started playing on school teams, some of those parents approached Rob and asked him to continue coaching Bantam teams. For a while, Karen said, Rob agreed “to come out of retirement” and do so.

Leslie attended grade and middle schools and the first year of high school in the Franklin Community School district, within whose boundaries their western Johnson County home was located. In summer 1998, between her freshman and sophomore years, she said, the family moved to a home along Lamb Lake southwest of Trafalgar.

The move put the Ray family in the Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson United School Corp., where Rob and Karen had attended school. For Leslie, that meant attending Indian Creek High School, beginning with her sophomore year. Her brothers would follow her there.

In her freshman year at Franklin Community High School, which had an enrollment slightly above 1,000 students,¹ Leslie did not participate in interscholastic sports because she said she felt intimidated by the school’s relatively large student population.

At the smaller Indian Creek High School, whose enrollment was about half that of Franklin’s at the time, Leslie felt more at ease, so she tried out for the swim team and, the following year, the golf team, making both.

On the swim team, she helped set the school record in the 200-meter team medley, competing in the event’s butterfly leg. She noted that the record didn’t last long after she graduated.

When the boys reached high school, they played football and basketball, just like their father. Justin also competed on the boys golf team.

As much as the Ray boys learned from their school coaches once they began playing interscholastic sports in Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson schools, Karen said, “Rob was the best coach for the boys.”

In an illustration of how Kyle fit the old adage, “Like father, like son,” she recalled a time when, after an early Bantam football practice one season, Rob came home and slammed the door behind him. Kyle walked in moments later, and he, too, slammed the door. A more prominent example was Kyle’s desire to play quarterback on his football teams, just like his father did in high school. And in high school, Kyle would elect to wear jersey number 10, just like his father did in high school.

Rob could be stern with his sons when he had to, Karen said. One time when Rob was coaching middle school ball, Kyle smart-mouthed his father. Rob told his son to run a lap as punishment, and Kyle refused. “Rob told Kyle, ‘Not only are you going to run that lap, but you’re also going to listen’.” Kyle ran the lap. And, he listened. In the family photo above, that’s Kyle (#23) running with the ball in a Bantam game.

Rob also coached Justin’s freshman high school basketball team and often would participate in the thick of the team’s scrimmages at practices. Kyle would come over to his brother’s practices after finishing his own at middle school and join the freshman scrimmages.

Kyle’s skills already were good enough that sometimes it seemed as if he were part of his older brother’s class, Justin said. Kyle would even hang out with Justin and his friends on occasion, and Justin, in turn, would hang out with Kyle and his friends.

Justin was a few inches shorter than his younger brother and was not as naturally strong as Kyle, but Justin worked hard to be his best, his mother said. Kyle occasionally was very intense – “he wanted to win, just like his father” – but she said there also were times when he didn’t want to put in the work.

“Kyle was naturally athletic and gifted, but he … rested on his laurels,” Karen said. “Rob had to push him more (than Justin),” and years later, Kyle credited his dad for nudging him to work harder.

Asked what comes to mind when people mention or ask about his father, Justin didn’t hesitate. “His smile and his laugh,” he said. The laugh was so loud, “you could hear it a mile away. It gets you laughing, too, it was that infectious.” 

Justin also pointed to Rob’s involvement in his children's sports. “He never pushed us into anything, and he always told us that if we try something, you should try to finish it first before going on to something else.”

He and Leslie recalled how their father would occasionally take the three children – or sometimes just Justin and Kyle – to Indian Springs Golf Course, a former nine-hole course in Johnson County that is now closed.

The owner, a client of the accounting firm where Rob worked, would let the Rays use a golf cart to drive to a nearby woods – Leslie remembers it being near the first hole – where the youths entered the wooded area and searched for lost and forgotten golf balls. They took them home and cleaned them.

“It was just a thing where Dad wanted to do something with us kids,” Justin said.

Leslie treasures those trips because the kids got to roam and explore the woods, perhaps conjuring adventures similar to those experienced by the Boxcar Children in the books she enjoyed reading or the playful re-enactments she and her friends indulged after reading the stories.

Justin and Kyle didn’t always need their father around to enjoy sports and games outdoors. Kyle spent hours throwing a football with classmate Caleb Raley. The boys' friendship spanned those early years – Bantam football and playing together on teams in middle and high schools. Raley would end up as a wide receiver on the Indian Creek High School varsity football team, catching many Matt Rogers and Kyle Ray passes for the Braves. He also would play on the defensive line.

Caleb recalled that he and Kyle first met at Fair Haven Christian Church in Trafalgar and its various church-related activities. The friendship grew to where they would get together often at the Ray residence, where Caleb and Kyle tossed the football back and forth in the front yard for what seemed like days upon end, often just to kill time. And because they both enjoyed it.

“There really wasn’t a time when me and Kyle were together when we did not throw the ball to each other,” Raley said. “We were either doing that or playing basketball. My parents would often call his parents and jokingly ask if I could please come home to maybe spend the night with them.”

Kyle figures that he was not more than 7 years old when he met Stewart “Red” Faught, the legendary and longtime Franklin College head football coach who was at the helm in the years Kyle’s father played at the school. 

Kyle was so young when he met Faught that he doesn’t remember much about the encounter, other than that it occurred outside a restaurant in downtown Franklin and that his father handled the introductions. In the family photo at left, Kyle is shown with his father while on vacation.

By the time Kyle and Caleb were in seventh grade, the Rays were living along Lamb Lake, and a third person joined the two boys in their various activities, pursuits and endeavors.

Kolby Harrell and his family, including mother, Karen; stepfather, Rudy; and older brother, Alex, had moved to rural southern Johnson County from the urban Eastside of Indianapolis. The Harrells found a house along the same lake, and Kyle, Caleb and Kolby became fast friends.

Kolby said that the move from a big-city like Indianapolis to a small community like Trafalgar required an adjustment for him.

One experience that jumped to mind as being different for him was how the whole high school football team would take a knee in the end zone before each game to recite the Lord’s Prayer together. “It struck some people as odd,” he said, “but that was a small-town thing, I guess.”

Many Trafalgar residents traveled northeast to Franklin to do “big-town” stuff like shopping or seeing a movie in a theater, Kolby said. Franklin had a distinguished destination to enjoy motion pictures on the big screen. The historic Artcraft, built in 1922 as a silent movie theater and Vaudeville house, is still standing and in operation. In 2022, the Artcraft observed its centennial year in operation. Its website proclaims the Artcraft as one of “the most intact Art Deco movie houses in central Indiana” and is listed on the Indiana State Register of Historic Places.

Trafalgar, Kolby noted, has one stoplight, the one at 135 and 252. “Everybody knows everybody. It was difficult for me at first when I came here. … It was strange how often that teachers knew a certain kid’s parents. I came to appreciate it after a while.”

Like Caleb, Kolby stayed at the Rays’ home overnight as often as three times a week. When it came to basketball, the boys sometimes would get the keys to the Intermediate school gym from Kyle’s mother, who worked there as a secretary from about 2000-05, and play pickup basketball games.

Or if they didn’t want to make that trek, they set up a Little Tikes basketball set on the Rays’ dining room table, cranked it up as high as it could go, and played one-on-one against each other. They “branded” those indoor games as LTL – for Little Tikes League.

“We had to brand everything,” Kolby said with a chuckle, quickly identifying Kyle as the individual in the trio who felt a need to “brand” things.

As for football, the boys’ indulgences eventually graduated from just tossing the ball around to incorporating the lake into their fun. The youths devised a game that Kyle branded “Dock Ball,” because it involved utilizing a three-sided dock that was used to define the borders of a swimming area near the shoreline. 

Dock Ball, as the boys devised it, blends the use of a football with the scoring system of baseball. One individual stands on the shore and throws the ball to someone standing on a dock portion parallel to the shore – usually about 20-30 yards away. Passes were supposed to be challenging enough that receivers might sometimes have to jump into the water to make the catch. In the accompanying Ray family photo, Kyle (right) stands with Harrell brothers Kolby (left) and Alex on the beach in front of the docks where Dock Ball was played. 

Dock Ball could be played with just two people or in teams of even-numbered players. Scoring and ball possession were similar to that in baseball. A single point (akin to a baseball run) was awarded for each completed pass, but a miss would count as an “out” like in baseball, and after three outs, the other team got a chance to score points before making three outs of its own. Players decided beforehand how many “innings” the game would go. Ties were decided by going to extra innings, just like in baseball. 

“We’d throw passes for hours at a time,” Kolby said. “When I think about Kyle as a quarterback, part of my thinking is how good he got at Dock Ball. He would throw it hard and high and got really good at it.”

A few years down the road, Kyle invited college roommate and football teammate Coty Bragdon to his home at Lamb Lake. During that visit, Kyle introduced Bragdon to Kolby – and to Dock Ball.

Eight to 10 years after the Ray family had moved away from Lamb Lake, which occurred about a year after Kyle graduated from college, Justin Ray learned just how enduring the game was.

“Some mom I ran into – I can’t remember who it was – was talking about how her kids are playing and loving this Dock Ball game. I said ‘Dock Ball? We invented Dock Ball!’ I think her kids must have been watching us play it” while the Ray family still lived along the lake.

Because the Rays’ home was close to the entrance of the Lamb Lake development, when Kolby got old enough to drive and returned home from running an errand, he could tell with near certainty if Kyle were in his house or out on the lake just by looking at the Ray family’s boat slip. If the boat were missing, he knew Kyle was out on the water. And if Kyle were on the water, more often than not Kolby would go to the lake and join his friend.

Kolby said the lake and the water were a welcome relief – and an outlet to recuperate – for the three friends and occasionally some of their teammates after late-summer, two-a-day football practices in high school.

Kolby has nothing but fond memories of Rob Ray, who he described as “a very even-tempered, kind man. I saw him as a father figure myself. He was not hard on the boys (Kyle and Justin). I remember wishing I had a father like him. … ”

Kolby’s parents had divorced and each remarried by the time he moved to Lamb Lake from Indianapolis, according to Kyle. In addition, Kolby’s father, John, and his second wife and family moved from Indiana to the South, Kyle said, so John wasn’t around a lot for his sons in those critical rearing years.

“I only met John a handful of times. I’ve known Kolby for about 20 years, and I met John maybe … hmmm … two or three times,” Kyle said.

Kyle remembers a time when Alex Harrell was playing in a freshman basketball game at Indian Creek High School and heard that his father was going to come watch him play.

“Alex could not help but keep looking in the stands,” trying to find his father, Kyle said. “John was late. Alex just wanted his dad to watch him. He wanted that relationship with his dad." 

Rob and Karen Ray were sensitive to the Harrell boys’ situation and welcomed Alex and Kolby into their home and on their own family trips, often picking up tabs just like Leslie remembers Rob doing for her friends.

Rob didn’t get angry even when he and Karen learned that Kyle, Caleb and Kolby had taken mattresses off the Rays’ beds and tossed them onto the front yard so they could have padding to break falls during tackling drills they’d run from time to time. Usually, the boys did this when Kyle’s parents weren’t around, but they always returned the mattresses and brushed off any dirt or debris, Kolby said.

The boys would hear about it, though, if the Ray parents came home to find that the boys had climbed out the window of Kyle’s upstairs room so they could sit on the house’s roof to hang out.

Kyle said that during his eighth-grade year (2002-03), fan frenzy over the Indian Creek High School football team reached the highest level he had ever seen.

It was Mike Gillin’s second year as head coach, and it was the senior season of the coach’s son and team’s starting quarterback, Casey Gillin. The Braves won their first 12 games and, more importantly, soundly defeated postseason nemesis Brownstown Central, 50-6, to win a sectional for the first time in what seemed like a decade.

“I remember the whole town, it seemed, showed up for the pep rally,” Kyle said. “I thought, Indian Creek football is here. We beat Brownstown Central!” Unfortunately, Indian Creek would lose the regional round game against Southridge, 39-20, the following week.

Kolby estimated that in eighth grade he stood 5-foot-5 and weighed 120 pounds “on a good day,” measurements that he felt were too small for football. Plus, he said his mother was not yet in favor of him playing such a physical sport. So he didn’t try out for the eighth-grade team. Nevertheless, the team’s head coach, Rob Ray, recruited Kolby to serve as team manager and statistician, and Kolby accepted.

Kyle recalled a dramatic, personal moment in an eighth-grade game against rival Brown County: 

The score was 14-14 with the clock winding down at the end of the game and Indian Creek on offense. With the ball near the 25-yard line of Brown County, and enough time left for one play, Kyle went back to pass. The defensive pressure was on him quickly, so he moved out of the pocket, broke a tackle and decided to make a run for it, cutting across the field. He said he scored the winning touchdown as time expired.

“That was probably the most excited and pumped I’ve ever been in a game. It was the last play.”

Kolby’s physical stature did not improve significantly once he entered high school or even in the years thereafter through his senior year, but he did go out for and make the football team his high school freshman year. He worked hard at practices and on scout teams, and he attended summer 7-on-7 competitions, such as the one depicted in the Ray family photo below showing Kyle preparing to pass and head football coach Mike Gillin on the left, observing.

 

The 7-on-7s would be mostly local, Kolby said, although he remembers the team did compete in 7-on-7 competitions at Butler University and at the Mellencamp practice field on the campus of Indiana University. 

7-on-7s, Kolby observed, “were a very backyard type of football” in which the defense touches or tags, instead of tackles, as a way to end a play. Players might wear helmets, he said, but they did not wear protective pads or other gear. 

During down time at the Butler 7-on-7s, Kolby recalled, Kyle joined a side competition in which quarterbacks tried to throw footballs into a trash can from about 20 yards away. “He was beating everybody,” Kolby said. 

At one point around this time, one of the three boys stumbled upon an old but still operable video camera in the Ray family’s garage. The youths hatched an idea to create and perform amusing sketches and use the camera to record them. The sketches would involve such things as acting out a fake hunting show, or doing a send-up on the Baywatch television show (made convenient by the fact that Kyle and Kolby lived at Lake Lamb).

And they did comical spins of a nature show. An example of this materialized one day when Kyle spotted a spider, Kolby said. As soon as they got the camera rolling, Kyle was waxing humorous every which way about the spider, the spider species and/or anything else related to spiders that came to mind. 

So taken were the boys by their productions that they branded their creative collective with a catchy name – 2KC (for the two of them whose first names began with the letter “K” plus the “C” in Caleb). The amusing video recordings continued well into the friends’ years at Indian Creek High School, where the sketches were a huge hit with students. 

“People ate it up. They loved them,” Kolby said of the comedy vignettes. Kolby credited Kyle for the videos’ popularity because he had so many ideas, and he possessed the talent and wit to compose a hilarious narrative on the spur of the moment.

When the three friends were sophomores, Kolby said, many seniors pleaded with 2KC to create sketches for them. So the trio held “auditions” for seniors to qualify for a sketch. 2KC made the seniors “do some embarrassing things” in the auditions, and for the most part, the seniors did what they were asked, Kolby said.

“Kyle was always a fun guy, talkative, the life of a party,” Kolby said. “He was kind of a character. He could think on his feet. You could roll the camera, and he would talk and be funny. … He could get people to follow him” without even trying. “And I don’t mean that in a bad way.” People simply gravitated to his genuineness and charisma, attributes he picked up from his father.

“We could have been famous on TikTok” if the popular contemporary entertainment app had been available on smart phones back then, Kyle said.

Kolby was the “technician” of the sketch-making trio, taking care of any needed editing or last-minute polishing, Kyle said. But Caleb felt that most of the videos they recorded didn’t require much work afterward. He said that what they shot usually was what viewers ended up seeing.

The trio also devised – and, remarkably, fetched considerable interest in and support for – a non-video promotion at school.

As Kolby explained it, the blandness of 2KC’s “the parking club” was somewhat akin to the “pet rock” novelty fad of the 1970s. For the parking club, 2KC designated a remote corner of the school lot as the club's parking site. Everyone who wanted to be in the club received a spiffy laminated parking club card as proof of membership. And as members, they had to park their vehicles in the designated remote corner of the school lot. It was key to the concept’s ridiculousness. 

In the spirit of “if you build it, people will come,”² students indeed came, wanting to be club members. And yes, according to Kolby, club members dutifully parked their vehicles there. Again, club members willingly parked in the farthest point possible from the school entrance. Just because they were members of the club.

On still another occasion, Kolby said, the three friends went to a Goodwill store, where each of them found and bought a three-piece suit and then wore the suits to school. Just because.

Kolby also recalled that for a freshman history class, each student was required to either write about or create something related to food or culture … or build to scale a replica of a renowned work of architecture. Kyle chose the latter.

Some of the other students who also elected to build a replica of a renowned structure chose such things as the Pyramids in Egypt or the Great Wall of China. Kolby said Kyle built a model of “The Big House,” a popular reference to the University of Michigan football stadium.

So in lock step were the three boys that they often were invited to and attended each other’s family get-togethers. Kyle says it was at one such get-together that he met Claire Freeman, his future wife. Claire and Kolby’s mothers are sisters.

Claire, however, says that she and Kyle first met at an Indian Creek football game when she was in sixth grade and Kyle was in eighth, which would have been 2002, “but I bet he’d say he doesn’t remember that. I was a bit smitten with the older guy.”

She said the family get-together Kyle remembers occurred afterward on a Memorial Day weekend at her home in Fishers. She recalled that attendees played basketball and volleyball, “and we just spent time hanging out outside. From my perspective, I was in eighth grade, and he was a sophomore in high school, and I was (still) smitten by an older guy.” 

The feeling was mutual, though, because Kyle said he remembers telling himself at that get-together that he hoped to marry Claire someday.

As good as the aforementioned 2002 Indian Creek High School football team was, the version two years later wasn’t too far off. Kyle’s older brother, Justin, a senior in 2004, and Kyle, then a sophomore, started in the team’s defensive backfield, and Matt Rogers was its quarterback. Indian Creek won every game from the beginning of the season until postseason sectionals, when it ran into Brownstown Central and lost, 26-13.

“That loss to Brownstown was probably the hardest loss for me,” said Kyle, who also served as the backup quarterback.

Football fortunes at Indian Creek in the new millennium contrasted with those from years earlier. For most of the 25-year period from 1976, the year Rob Ray graduated from Indian Creek High School, until 2001, the school’s football team experienced a protracted lack of success – just six winning seasons, and none better than 7-3 (in 1982 and ’84).

The tide turned in 2001 when the Gillins – coach Mike and quarterback Casey – arrived in Trafalgar.

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Footnotes:

1 - If the "Nineveh" name rings a bell, those familiar with the 1986 motion picture Hoosiers might remember that the film used the former Nineveh School as the setting of fictional Hickory High School for exterior and some interior shots, including its wide, wooden staircase. Though still in operation as an elementary school during the filming of Hoosiers, the school closed the following year. In subsequent years, it was the target of vandalism and at least two arsons before being razed in 2000. A painting of the school by Nineveh artist Luke Buck appears at right, used here with Buck's permission.

2 - Today, Franklin Community High School’s enrollment is about 1,560 students, while Indian Creek High School’s enrollment, at 585 students, has remained pretty constant since the Ray siblings were there.

3 - An oft-quoted line uttered by the mysterious “voice” in the 1989 motion picture Field of Dreams.

Tomorrow in Chapter 5: Where Legends Played

Previously in "On Hoosier Gridirons": 

Introduction

Chapter 1: 'We Stood Out'

Chapter 2: Mastering the Spread

Chapter 3: The Kicker With the Ever-Present Smile