A long, strange, frustrating trip that lasted 3 years …

Almost two years ago, beginning on Aug. 1, 2023, a multipart series spotlighting small-high school and small-college football in Indiana ran in this space. It was a significant departure from what this blog usually presented over the years, which has been a chronicling of my various photographic shoots and pursuits. 

To put the “significant departure” succinctly, the multi-part, multi-post series On Hoosier Gridirons was about storytelling through the traditional journalistic process of reporting, writing and mostly the use of words, instead of the art of photography ordinarily used in Photo Potpourri.

In the course of my months of research and interviews leading up to the publication of stories in that series, I stumbled upon by pure happenstance (or dumb luck, if you will) what struck me then (and continues today) to be a significant misdeed — albeit unintentional — dealt to a legendary small-college football coach, the late Stewart “Red” Faught (pictured at left). Faught coached football teams at Franklin (Ind.) College from 1957 to 1988 — 32 years.

What made the misdeed so frustrating to me was the “perfect storm” that led to it in the first place. It was the unfortunate result of a statewide institution — the Indiana Football Hall of Fame — that did not abide the trust it had been accorded by members of the news media, who then compounded the misdeed by neglecting their professional duty to double-check facts.

In summer 2018, news media reports started circulating stories about how Franklin College’s then-head football coach, Mike Leonard, was close to equaling and passing Red Faught’s school record for total wins as football coach, and that Leonard would likely pass Faught’s total sometime that season. The stories cited Faught’s total career wins as 120, and once the first story broke citing that number, other print and broadcast media picked up the story and repeated the 120 wins total as fact. 

The problem was ... 120 was not Faught’s final wins total. I worked in the newspaper business for 37+ years, and while going to journalism classes in college, nothing was more ingrained in us students than the importance of accuracy and how double-checking facts was a critical step in ensuring accuracy.

Through most of my years in the business, the majority of which (33+) were spent in the newsroom of The Indianapolis Star, we had a decent-sized staff that included several layers of editing, fact-checking and back-stopping in its news production. That isn’t the case today. 

In 2025, newsrooms across the globe — if they are still in operation (and many smaller dailies have been bought out and/or folded) — have slashed staff and now rely on a razor-thin number of people to crank out much thinner newspapers in favor of “online content.” There aren’t multiple layers of editing anymore.

Back to my perfect storm case ... I came upon the Faught career wins snafu in mid-2022 while working on the On Hoosier Gridirons small-high school and small-college football series project. I needed to get my hands on a precise number of career coaching wins, losses and ties for Faught in his time as head coach at Franklin College. I went first to his Wikipedia entry, hoping to find that information there. When Wikipedia said his record was 155 wins, 146 losses and 6 ties, my eyes bugged out. 

I immediately remembered that Mike Leonard had left the school in 2019 with a wins total in the 120s (it turned out to be 129). I also remembered the media coverage of Leonard’s alleged passing of Faught’s wins total the previous year. I knew something was amiss. I hunted around for whatever more authoritative documentation I could find on Faught’s final record at Franklin College.

One of the next documents I encountered in my search was a Faught biography at the Indiana Digital Library, which states that Faught finished his time at Franklin with a record of 160-139-6. I now had a third different Franklin College wins number for the coach.

I started searching on newspapers.com and came across those newspaper stories by The Indianapolis Star and Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal quoting the 120 wins number leading up to Leonard’s 2018 season as head coach, so I figured I would have to find out where they got that number from. 

It didn’t take me long. A Google search came next, and I found the 120 number cited in the Faught member biography page of the Indiana Football Hall of Fame website, where at the time it said Faught’s career coaching record was 120-99-4. 

I resumed my Google search and could find no other “authoritative” resource using the same record as displayed by the Indiana Football Hall of Fame. So I was pretty sure where the progenitors of the 2018 Mike Leonard publicity got their “data” from. My eventual research would determine that the IFHOF was wrong on all three counts for Faught — wins, losses and ties. And it was significantly wrong. The Wikipedia entry was in error, too, but at least it came much closer to the truth than the IFHOF.

I returned to newspaper.com and dug back to late 1988, when Faught was ending his Franklin coaching career. I began to collect and copy stories repeating the 160-139-6 number I had seen at the Indiana Digital Library. At that point, I decided to contact Ryan Thomas, an assistant athletic director at Franklin College who at the time also was serving as sports information director. I asked him if he knew that the school had a significant accuracy problem on its hands regarding Red Faught’s coaching record. 

I told Thomas of my findings regarding the conflicting numbers for Faught’s coaching record, and while he politely thanked me, he said the college had no authoritative record available to verify Faught’s official final coaching record and that until it had more authoritative information, it would continue to recognize Mike Leonard as the all-time wins leader. 

He explained that all of the school’s official athletic teams’ records and data vanished upon the death of longtime sports information director Kevin Elixman in July 2015. No archival records could be found in Elixman's office nor, apparently, on his office computer for any and all sports at the school, he said. Elixman had held the SID job for 25 years. 

One of the tasks Thomas told me he faced was to somehow re-create as much of those missing records as he could, although he was at a loss as to exactly how he was going to be able to do it or when he would hopefully finish. 

Sympathizing with his plight, I told him I would spend a few hours at newspapers.com going back to 1957 and hopefully piece together a chart from scratch, logging each of Faught’s wins, losses and ties in every season to ascertain his full record. I told Thomas I would let him know my findings.

It took me quite a few hours over one day and part of the next to assemble the chart, and when I finished, I came up with a final record of 159-140-6. Yes, it bothered me at the time that my wins and losses numbers were one off from the prevailing data I was encountering in my research (160-139), but I had nothing to explain it except that either those people had miscounted or somehow the outcome of one game in all those seasons had been reversed. (The latter would prove to be prophetic, but more on that later.)

I reported these finding to Thomas and sent him a copy of my hard-copy tallies as well as a PDF/Word document onto which I had composed a more readable year-by-year chart. On the far right side of the chart, I included the name of the source publication I used, the publication date and the page number from which I derived my information for each game over those 32 seasons.

For the record, the former Franklin Evening Star was my source for almost all of the results through 1963; the Johnson County Daily Journal was the source for almost all the results thereafter, through 1988.   

I also sent Thomas copies of the newspaper clippings I collected in my research citing the 160 wins total (including the Daily Journal’s front-page obituary for Faught in September 2005. That 2005 obituary included a sidebar with the 160-139-6 record.)

Another of those clippings, a Nov. 11, 1988, column by notable Indianapolis News Sports Editor Wayne Fuson, contained a sidebar season-by-season chart very similar to the one I had just compiled from scratch. Fuson’s chart also tallied 160-139-6. His chart and mine agree in every season except 1961, when his chart states that the team won 4 and lost 5; my findings were that the Grizzlies won only 3 games that year and lost 6. 

Because of how troubled I was about that conflict with the 1961 season, I even went back to the Evening Star archives for 1961 and double-checked my data. I again came up with a 3-6 season record. (More on this later.)

About two weeks later, I wrote again to Thomas asking how my documentation was received by the athletics department, and he said the department appreciated my work and was prepared to acknowledge that Faught was still the all-time wins leader. As best as I know, the school made no public admission of such, however. 

I decided it was time to talk to someone at the Indiana Football Hall of Fame to see if they could enlighten me as to how there was such a significant discrepancy with its data on Faught. I reached out to Matt Fisher, who at the time — this was still mid-2022 — was listed as a member of the IFHOF Board of Trustees. He also was a science teacher at Richmond High School. (He no longer appears to be on the board.)

Fisher returned my call, and when I explained to him why I had contacted him, he didn’t take long to surmise that the 120-99-4 record at Faught’s IFHOF member biographical page probably was the coach’s record at the time Faught was inducted into the Hall which was June 27, 1981. (Faught would coach for seven more seasons, amassing 40 more wins, 40 more losses and two more ties before calling it a career at Franklin.)

Fisher further surmised that Faught’s coaching record did not get updated when the Hall went to carry over the coach’s biographical info onto his member web page when the IFHOF went online. Fisher explained that the Hall is thin-staffed and doesn’t have the manpower to stay on top of such things as updating member biographical information. In most cases, it’s not an issue because most inductees usually don’t enter the Hall until their careers are over. But there have been exceptions, and Faught was one of those.

I got the full June 27, 1981, induction date initially from the IFHOF, which had that information on its bio page for Faught at the time I talked to Fisher. I also confirmed it from newspaper clippings. I made a screen grab photo of Faught’s complete IFHOF bio page to have on hand for comparison if any changes were later made.

Fisher divulged one other shocking (at least to me) bit of information during our conversation. He said the IFHOF had closed and sold its physical building in Richmond during the COVID pandemic and that it was now operating as an online-only entity.  

Not long after I talked to Fisher, I sent him a copy of the same news clipping documentation and the Word/PDF chart showing Faught’s real year-by-year record while at Franklin College that I had sent to Ryan Thomas. (Note: A few weeks later, someone did get into Faught’s IFHOF biographical page and removed the date of Faught’s induction ??? ... but left the bad coaching record numbers intact!)

Unfortunately, the IFHOF member biographies snafu doesn’t stop with Red Faught. The On Hoosier Gridirons project I was working on involved two other Indiana Football Hall of Fame coach inductees who were still active at the time, Bud Wright of Sheridan and Mike Gillin, then coaching at Mooresville. Wright was inducted in 2002 and Gillin in 2014. I checked their wins, losses and ties in their IFHOF biographies, and sure enough, their numbers were outdated, too. 

Interestingly, someone did go back into Wright's bio sometime after 2011 and note that he became Indiana's all-time winningest football coach that year with Sheridan’s victory that season over Lapel High School. Wright finished at Sheridan in 2024 with a career record of 463-219. In Gillin’s case, his IFHOF bio — as of Dec. 14, 2025 — had him still coaching at Indian Creek High School, which he had left in 2014. He took over the head coaching job at Mooresville High School in 2017 and stepped down after the 2025 season with a career record of 373-157. His high school coaching career wins total is good for third best in Indiana.

After going through all this, I was left with a bothersome dilemma. How would I handle these findings in the On Hoosier Gridirons series? I rationalized that because Faught was a very small part of the package, and given that Leonard had stepped down as head coach in 2019 and was no longer in position to break Faught’s wins record, I should relegate what I had learned to a mere footnote. And so that’s what I did; it is the first footnote in Chapter 5. It’s a very long footnote, but again, it’s just a footnote.

But that all changed in early December 2024, when Franklin College announced that Mike Leonard would return to the school and coach the football team again, beginning with the 2025 season. Of course, local news media reported the news that Leonard was returning to coach, still describing Leonard as the winningest football coach in Franklin College history … because no public correction had been made even though the college had been aware of the error for two and a half years.

I wrote by email to the reporter who wrote that breaking news story for The Indianapolis Star and told him about my findings. I also sent him authoritative documentation similar to what I had sent Ryan Thomas and Matt Fisher. He kindly acknowledged my alert and thanked me. He said he’d spread the word to the rest of The Star sports staff. 

When I told him that when I was still at the newspaper, we would have published a correction — even if it involved fixing an error four years after the fact. That way, our library would be able to attach the correction and a warning to archived stories containing the error so that reporters and editors coming across erroneous clippings while doing research in the future would be alerted to the errors and not repeat them. 

The reporter responded as I had expected. He said staff reductions at the state’s largest newspaper had even reached the valued librarians and that there was no longer a library staff to do such things.

I also relayed the same information and documentation by email to the reporter who wrote the story about Leonard’s return for the Johnson County Daily Journal. I received no acknowledgment or response. So I wrote to that reporter’s sports editor, Ryan O’Leary, who did acknowledge and thanked me. He also said that Franklin College’s Ryan Thomas had contacted him after seeing the reporter’s story mentioning Leonard as the school’s winningest coach. O’Leary said Thomas passed along the news that Faught was still the top dog.

O’Leary was kind enough to share with me the identity of the individual who started the media stir in 2018, and in deference to his act of kindness (that mystery — about who started it all — had bothered me since I first came across the problem in 2022), I’m not going to embarrass that individual publicly by divulging the name here. 

O’Leary did tell me he felt that his paper should do something to publicly acknowledge the original faux pas, agreeing that readers deserve to understand what is going on now that Leonard was returning. He said he would address it in a column that weekend. I no longer live in Indiana, so I didn’t know if he followed through on that promise. I hunted around for it but had no luck.

Two weeks later, I still couldn’t find any evidence online that the Daily Journal had addressed the issue, so I wrote again to O’Leary to inquire if he’d mentioned the snafu in a column, and if so, when. 

His response: “I did not. Leaving it alone for the moment at the request of Ryan Thomas. I revised all our most recent online stories and will make sure all future references are correct. At some point I’ll find a proper way to address it without humiliating anyone.”

A couple weeks later, I made one more attempt to nudge the IFHOF to recognize — and fix — the problem its outdated member biographies pose for website visitors and for researchers. At the IFHOF website, I found a “contact” option I did not remember coming across when I first sought out someone with the IFHOF to discuss the data snafu in 2022. 

This contact option allows a visitor to send a message to someone (there’s no indication who will get it) by filling out a form and submitting it. So I filled out the form, explained my business and waited. Within a few days, I received the following:

“Hi Joe. Thank you for your email. The IFCA (Indiana Football Coaches Association) took over the Indiana Football Hall of Fame in 2021, when Richmond closed its doors due to financial hardship. All bios on the website before 2021 were initiated from Richmond. I can only speak on the bios since then. When a person is inducted into the Hall of Fame, we send a “bio template” to the nominee and ask him to fill it out. The information is provided by the Hall of Famer. We ask them not to include the “ages” of children or grandchildren and the numbers of “wins/losses” if they are still current, as (that information) is impossible to (keep current). We also give them the opportunity to update their information by emailing me directly. Obviously, in the case of Coach Faught, it has never been updated.

“We are currently working with our website company to investigate the possibility of using AI (artificial intelligence) to keep track of wins and losses, championships, etc. We have over 900 inducted into the hall, and we try our best to stay “up to date.”

The response was signed by Scott Bovenkerk, who identified himself as the coordinator of the IFCA-Hall of Fame. This was the first I’d learned that the coaches association had taken over responsibility for the IFHOF. Matt Fisher had not mentioned that to me in 2022.

Several weeks later, after again checking Faught’s page at the IFHOF, I noticed someone had changed the coach’s career record — but used the erroneous data from the coach’s aforementioned Wikipedia entry. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the product of using AI to which Bovenkerk had alluded. I sent an email alert to Bovenkerk telling him that Faught’s Wikipedia data was not accurate. I received no acknowledgement of receipt or any other response.

Then in late June 2025, I heard from O’Leary, who now was the soon-to-be former sports editor of the Daily Journal, letting me know he had been hired to replace Ryan Thomas at Franklin College (Thomas had recently left to take a non-sports public relations/communications position in Indianapolis). O’Leary said he would begin his new job the following Monday but that he was in his new office trying to set up. He said he’d found a stack of documents there in which there was a sheet of paper containing a chart very similar to the one I had compiled from scratch.

Faught’s career record at Franklin after adding up all the numbers on the chart he found was 160-139-6. He took a picture of the chart and sent it to me so I could compare it to my chart. Again we agreed in every season except that one in 1961 that also differed from Wayne Fuson’s 1988 chart.

I reminded O’Leary that my chart had concluded with a final record of 159-140-6, and without hesitation, he said the document he came across also contained an apparent explanation for the 1961 discrepancy in numbers: While Taylor University had handily defeated the Grizzlies on the field that season, at some point afterward, it was determined that Taylor had used an ineligible player in the game, so Taylor was assessed a loss by forfeit ex-post facto. 

That information was not in the game story when I came across it in the archives while doing my research, so there was nothing to send me hunting for more information to learn about the forfeit. So my chart’s final career coaching record for Faught has since been modified to agree with O’Leary’s, Fuson’s and the Indiana Digital Library: 160-139-6.

Before ending our conversation, I asked O’Leary if he would try to figure out a way to publicly explain/correct the 2018 snafu, given how Mike Leonard would be adding to his career totals when the 2025 season began, and he said he would, adding that he would do it in a way that avoided embarrassment to anyone. I also told him I thought the IFHOF would be more inclined to make a change to get Faught’s bio coaching record accurate if it heard about the error and correct numbers from someone at the college like O’Leary.

For the record, the next day I wrote once more to Bovenkerk at the IFHOF to tell him that O’Leary and I had conversed and reached agreement on the 160-139-6 numbers for Faught’s career record at Franklin. I told him he was welcome to contact O’Leary and verify, now that O’Leary was an official employee of the college’s athletics department. I also told Bovenkerk when O’Leary would start his new job at Franklin (June 30). I have yet to hear back from Bovenkerk, although at this point, I don’t expect to. As of July 3, 2025, the IFHOF bio for Faught was still using the erroneous numbers from Faught’s Wikipedia entry.

Note added Aug. 26, 2025: I checked Faught’s IFHOF member bio page this morning, and the correct career record is now there.

I will say that until now, I had felt like a lone voice in the wilderness about this whole thing, especially considering that I had no media platform of importance to right this wrong. It has been extremely frustrating. 

I’ll wrap this up with an admonition: If you are a member of the news media who is reading this, please be aware of the flawed data in the IFHOF member biographies, at least those members who were inducted before the end of their careers. Consider yourselves warned!

CHAPTER 5Where legends played

In Johnson County, Ind., the accomplishments of Mike Gillin and son Casey at Indian Creek High School are legendary. 

Mike Gillin (shown at right in a photo he provided) introduced the spread offense to his Class 2A Indian Creek High School football team when he hired on as head coach in 2001. Local residents affectionately referred to the offense as “pass happy.” (In just a few short years, the spread – or “pass happy” offense – also would be introduced at South Newton High School, 135 miles north of Trafalgar.)

Spread offenses at the time were few and far between in high school football. College coach Urban Meyer had been using them at his stops at Bowling Green, Utah and Florida and would do so again at Ohio State in 2012, and it was at the turn of the millennium that high school coaches who liked what Meyer was doing decided to try and implement that approach in their high school playbooks.

And the true progenitor of the spread might well be Stewart “Red” Faught, Franklin (Ind.) College’s longtime head coach (1957-1988). His offensive playbooks tilted heavily in favor of the passing game for years.

The “spread” got its name because of its use of three, four and sometimes even five pass receivers who spread out from core offensive blockers on the line of scrimmage. By using that scheme, “spread” also is what the offense wants to do to the defense; the spread forces defenses to pull people (usually linebackers) away from the area of the offense's center and quarterback to cover the extra receivers. And if defenses don’t do that, they risk leaving a receiver open, something quarterbacks seek to exploit, hopefully for long-yardage gains.

Some sons might have difficulty playing a sport coached by their father, but not Casey Gillin, who today still holds or ranks high among Indian Creek’s career, single-season and single-game passing records. Casey’s astounding 60 touchdown passes in 2002 remain a single-season record for Indiana high schools, and his 8,806 career passing yards rank 14^th all-time among state high school players.

Mike and Casey Gillin brought immediate success to the Indian Creek football program. In 16 seasons as head coach at the school, Mike had a win-loss record of 140-45. Those 140 wins are just 22 short of the aggregate total (162) of all 10 coaches who preceded him at Indian Creek.

And after never having enjoyed a season with double-digit victories in the preceding three decades, the Indian Creek High School Braves went 10-1 and 12-1 with Casey at quarterback in 2001 and ’02.

After graduating from Indian Creek, Casey enjoyed three outstanding seasons quarterbacking teams at the University of Indianapolis, better known today as UIndy, a NCAA Division II school in adjacent Marion County, directly north of Johnson County. 

In December 2021, several years after Mike and Casey had departed Trafalgar to pursue other interests, Casey sparked hope for a new wave of success at Indian Creek when he returned to his high school alma mater to take over as head coach. 

In 2022, his first season at the helm, the Braves finished 7-4; the team’s record in 2023 was 8-4. But in January 2024, Casey announced he planned to leave Indian Creek to join his father, head coach at Mooresville (Ind.) High School, for the 2024 season to serve as offensive coordinator. 

Then in January 2025, Casey accepted the job of offensive coordinator for Wabash College’s football Little Giants but spent only one season there. In December 2025, he was named head coach at Mooresville, succeeding his father, who had stepped down at the conclusion of that season.

Good friends Kyle Ray, Caleb Raley and Kolby Harrell went out for the Indian Creek High School football team in 2003, their freshman year. All three played primarily on the junior varsity that first year.

Caleb played defensive end and wide receiver on the varsity squad from sophomore year thereafter. He said the defensive end position fell into place because he was tall (6-foot-3) and because, by the time he was a senior, he weighed 225 pounds.

Kolby, still slight of stature, made the varsity his sophomore year, but saw no live-action playing time that year or the year after. But he was not deterred; he enjoyed the team camaraderie and practiced diligently with special teams and defensive cornerbacks.

Meanwhile, Kyle played full time in the defensive backfield sophomore and junior years. He had wanted to start at quarterback and lead the offense, but at the time, another stellar quarterback, southpaw Matt Rogers, who succeeded Casey Gillin, was starting ahead of him.

Kyle spent his sophomore and junior years as Rogers’ backup on the offensive depth chart. Kyle (#10) and older brother Justin (#5) are shown above in a family photo from the 2004 high school football season at Indian Creek.

Mike and Casey Gillin and Matt Rogers weren’t the only legends Kyle and Justin Ray were following at Indian Creek. The brothers also were legacies of Rob Ray, their father.

When Rob played at Indian Creek, the Braves compiled 6-4 seasons his sophomore and junior years. The Trafalgar community got really excited during his senior year, 1975, when Rob – then known as Robbie – directed head coach Tom Scott’s run-dominant wishbone offense to near-perfection. The Braves went undefeated through the regular season and came one game short of playing for a state championship.

The Braves finished 9-1 that season, their only loss coming at Lawrenceburg, 26-7, in their first game of the postseason.

In 1975, the Indiana High School Athletic Association was in only its third year of class-division postseason football, and only four teams qualified for the postseason in each of three classes. (As yet, there were no sectionals or regionals.)

Hence, there was a maximum of just two games a team could possibly play in the postseason, so the “playoffs” for a championship entailed what amounted to a semifinal and a final.

A Ray family photo at left shows team co-captains Rob Ray (10) and Pat Haugh (55) just before the start of the postseason game vs. Lawrenceburg.

Had Indian Creek beaten Lawrenceburg in what constituted the Class A tournament’s semifinal game, the Braves not only would have played for the championship the following week against Wes-Del, but they also would have hosted that game. Instead, Lawrenceburg hosted the final, beating Wes-Del, 28-14.

Robbie Ray ranked third in Johnson County in total rushing yardage in 1975. He had 789 yards on 96 carries, and his average of 8 yards per carry was best among the top 11 rushers in the county. He ranked third in the county in passing yardage (640) and was tied for first in touchdown passes (12), according to statistics published that year in the Johnson County Daily Journal.

When the then-United Press International wire service announced its all-state team at the end of the 1975 season, Robbie Ray was included as an honorable mention.

After graduating third in his high school class in 1976, Robbie went on to play wide receiver for Red Faught at Franklin College, which is a short drive northeast of Trafalgar.

In 1976, Faught was in his 20^th season as the school’s head coach, and he would go on to coach for 12 more seasons, compiling a record of 160-139-6¹ at Franklin when he stepped down following the 1988 season, making him the winningest football coach in Franklin College history. Faught was inducted into the Indiana Football Hall of Fame on June 27, 1981, seven years before he stepped down.

In 1979, Robbie’s senior year at Franklin College, the Grizzlies finished 6-4 and in second place in the Heartland Collegiate Conference. Robbie was named second team NAIA All-America and was voted the Grizzlies’ and HCC’s Most Valuable Player.

Rob graduated Franklin College cum laude, earning a bachelor’s degree in business and accounting. At graduation, he was honored as the president of the Delta Mu Delta business honorary, was named to the Alpha Scholastic Honorary and was presented the Wall Street Journal Award for his outstanding performance in the classroom.

Kolby Harrell’s recollection of Rob Ray’s good personality agrees with the recollection of at least one person at Woodbury & Co. in Franklin, which today goes by the name Woodbury Group. The accounting firm is where Rob spent the majority of his working career.

“I know a lot of accountants, and Rob was not like a lot of accountants,” said Max Woodbury III, a teammate of Kyle Ray at both Indian Creek High School and Franklin College.

Rob and Max III’s years at the accounting firm didn’t overlap much, but Max was familiar enough with Rob to say that Rob “had a good personality and didn't mind speaking to clients. People liked him, and to this day, some of my old clients bring him up somehow in our conversations.

“Most accountants just want to sit behind the computer and prepare tax returns, but Rob was willing to explain and answer questions … a lot like my dad, who is the same way. I try to be the same while I am running the business currently.”

As for teammate Kyle Ray, Max said: “I remember Kyle as a humble and athletic quarterback. Seemed to me he was always happy and smiling, which helped me be a better person.”

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

Justin Ray, Rob’s older son, got his 15 minutes of fame early in 2004 in his junior year on Indian Creek’s basketball team, although, as it turned out, it entailed more than just 15 minutes.

Late in the regular season, some parents in the Indian Creek High School community – including those who had boys on the basketball team – were at the apex of a protracted disenchantment with the way they felt Indian Creek boys basketball coach Larry Angle favored his son, senior J.R. Angle, over and beyond what other players and the parents felt was normal.

They had complained about this as far back as when Larry Angle first started coaching at the school three years previously.

The parents heard players say the coach repeatedly instructed them to pass the ball to J.R., a prolific scorer who eventually obtained a scholarship to play the sport collegiately at the University of Iowa.²

Two years into Larry Angle’s term as coach, according to Kyle Ray, the athletic director was hearing the complaints, too, and investigated. He found the complaints to be valid and recommended to the School Board that coach Angle be removed, Kyle said. But the School Board declined to do so.

So here it was, two years later, in February 2004, and the issue was still hanging over the boys basketball program. Even though J.R.'s high school career was winding down, a few parents decided that unusual – and unorthodox – action was required, action that would eventually make news headlines throughout Indiana and beyond.

According to news reports at the time, a group of parents approached Justin Ray one day and offered him money to execute what could best be described as a “purpose prank” during the last home game of the season, which coincided with the team’s annual Senior Night.

The purpose of the prank – or stunt  – was to expose the coach’s longtime favoritism in a public way, in front of witnesses, i.e., the crowd at a home game. The parents asked Justin to pass the ball to J.R., exactly per the coach’s oft-repeated instruction, but not while the two players were on the court together. They wanted Justin to be on the court during live play and J.R. to be sitting on the bench after having been removed for a substitute.

For a period before the Senior Night game, Justin had talked to Kyle about the ongoing issue and said he was contemplating doing something publicly to stand up for himself and the other players on the team, Kyle said.

It was unclear whether the angry parents had approached Justin about doing the stunt before or after Justin first confided in Kyle. But Kyle said he knew before Senior Night that his brother was considering doing something demonstrative – and unusual – that evening.

On Senior Night – J.R. was the only senior on the team that season – the Braves were playing Johnson County foe Greenwood. Late in the fourth quarter, Justin and Kyle were sitting on the bench together when coach Angle told Justin to go into the game for J.R. When that happened, Kyle said, he thought to himself: “Oh man, it’s going to happen. Is it going to happen now?”

He didn’t have to wait long to get an answer. It did, indeed, happen. Kyle said he saw his brother make the pass to J.R., now sitting on the bench, and Kyle said he saw J.R. catch the ball. But Kyle said his eyes didn’t linger on J.R.; he was immediately drawn to look at the crowd because of how fans were reacting.

“The student section went nuts. Some of the parents cheered,” Kyle said.

Parents came up to Justin after the game and gave him $45 for his trouble. Justin no doubt had an inkling he’d get an earful from school officials about the stunt (and he did), but what he probably didn’t realize immediately was how his acceptance of $45 would make matters considerably worse for him.

At the time, an amateur athlete at any level of competition was not allowed to accept monetary compensation for anything that was part of or could be tied to amateur sport competitions such as high school basketball. This was well before the name, influence and likeness (NIL) compensation rule was adopted in college athletics.

In short order, Justin returned the money and apologized to coach Angle, to J.R. and to the school, according to Justin's mother, Karen Ray. But apologies would not make trouble associated with the acceptance of cash vanish immediately.

Kyle Ray fiercely defended Justin and his action, but he also defended J.R. Angle.

Justin didn’t pull the prank to shame J.R., Kyle emphasized. He did it to send a message to the school “that this was what we were trained to do – to pass the ball to J.R.”

And as for J.R., Kyle said: “J.R. was a victim just like everyone else. J.R. was a good guy. I imagine it was tough on him.”

Justin remained on the hot seat for several months afterward. Very soon after the game, he was suspended from the team. At first, the suspension was just for the rest of the season, which involved only a few games. But later, the Indiana High School Athletic Association – the regulatory authority of all high school sports in Indiana – announced that Justin would be suspended from participating in any interscholastic sports for his entire senior season, 2004-05.

Meanwhile, the School Board finally parted ways with coach Angle following that school year. It also decided not to renew the contracts of its athletics director and superintendent of schools.

Karen Ray said that at some point before the next school year, when the fury over the incident had long subsided, she and Justin sat down with IHSAA commissioner Blake Ress and negotiated a much less severe punishment for her son: Justin would be suspended for just his first four athletic games/meets in his senior year. Those all turned out to be golf meets, so Justin was able to play a full football and basketball schedule in his final year of high school.

Karen said she and husband Rob were aware of the community unrest with coach Angle’s alleged favoritism on the team at the time. “Justin had friends on the team who were not happy,” she said.

But she said she and Rob were not aware that parents had approached Justin to do the “purpose prank” or to offer their son cash compensation to do it. “If we had been (aware), we would have stopped it,” she said. The months from February 2004 until the fall “were one of the worst times of my life,” she said.

In the weeks after the incident, Rob and Karen tried to help the community heal from the incident by writing an impassioned letter, via the Letters to the Editor forum in the Johnson County Daily Journal. Published in the newspaper’s editions of March 10, 2004, the letter urged the community to move on.

“Justin has been miserable, along with other students, teammates and, yes, even adults,” they wrote. It was unfortunate, they continued, that Karen and Rob did not know about the plans ahead of time so they could stop the prank and meet with the adults who thought it was a good idea to give Justin money for doing what he did.

“Yes, it was in poor judgment, and for that they are remorseful and have expressed their sorrow to our family. But in our own son’s words, ‘Parents did not influence me.’ He has been truthful and forthright from the beginning. Yes, kids do make mistakes, and we should be there to help them learn from them.”

“Now to the important issue. This community needs to come together to heal and forgive. There has been too much hurt on both sides of this issue. We want to be part of the solution, not the problem.”

In his interview for this story in 2022 – 18 years after the incident – Justin Ray declined to discuss details of the prank other than to say, “When you’re young, you make decisions, and you have to live with them.”

An interesting twist of fate occurred a decade or so later: The Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson United School Corp. hired Justin Ray as athletics director, serving first at Indian Creek Middle School and later at the high school.

And while Justin declined to discuss the prank at length, he did say that a man who officiated that 2004 basketball game between Indian Creek and Greenwood was assigned to work a game at Indian Creek High School in 2014, when Justin was athletics director. Justin said he and the referee crossed paths that evening, neither recognizing the other at first.

The two began talking, and the referee told Justin that the last time he had worked a game at the school was the night an Indian Creek player threw a pass to a teammate sitting on the bench near the end of the game. Justin said he turned to the referee and said, “Would you believe that the guy who threw that pass is standing in front of you?”

After serving in those director of athletics jobs for several years, Justin left the school district in April 2017 to be a supervisor of grounds at Whiteland High School in the Clark-Pleasant Community School Corp., which is in northeastern Johnson County, Ind. Justin has since left that job, too, to sell insurance for Aflac Inc., also in Johnson County.

When not working, Justin today serves as associate online campus director for Emmanuel Church in Johnson County.

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

With Matt Rogers at quarterback in 2003, ’04 and ’05, Indian Creek’s football teams finished with records of 9-3, 10-1 and 7-4. Rogers led Indian Creek to undefeated Mid-Indiana Football Conference championships in 2004 and ’05, but the Braves lost in the postseason sectionals both years to Brownstown Central (as well as in 2003, when South Decatur won the league title). After graduating high school, Rogers had a successful career quarterbacking at Marian University, an NAIA member school in Indianapolis. 

Coach Mike Gillin said Rogers rarely needed to be taken out of games at Indian Creek. Usually, the only times the starting quarterback came out were when the Braves held a significant lead and/or victory was assured, so backup QB Kyle Ray didn’t see a lot of action on offense. Ray did start on defense both years and had ambitions in his senior year to step into Rogers’ shoes.

There were two games in 2004 when Ray saw more than mop-up action as quarterback. On a scramble shortly before halftime in the Braves’ Sept. 3 game against Eastern Hancock, a Royals defender hit Rogers on the right, non-throwing forearm, which according to the Daily Journal game story, numbed the limb from wrist to shoulder.

Gillin pulled Rogers out of the 7-7 game at the start of the third quarter, and Kyle Ray entered in his place. The Braves rode the back of running back Curtis Pfaehler, who gained 40 yards on his first four carries of the first drive with Ray behind center. The drive ended when Ray tossed an 8-yard scoring pass to Jeremiah Tworek.

Three weeks later, Rogers sat out the whole game against Milan while recovering from minor arthroscopic knee surgery, and Kyle took over. Again, the Braves turned to Pfaehler to carry the offense, and he responded, gaining 172 yards on 14 carries and scoring five of Indian Creek’s eight total rushing touchdowns.

Ray scored one of those rushing TDs himself – a 46-yarder in the second quarter. He also completed 10 of 22 passes for 182 yards. One of those completions was a 23-yarder to his brother, Justin, who normally played defensive exclusively. Coach Gillin had sent Justin into the game on offense to run a corner route from the left wideout position.

Justin pointed to that Ray-to-Ray pass completion as one of his favorite memories of high school football. He said coach Gillin put Kyle and Justin in on offense occasionally in other games and that his brother threw three or four other passes to him during Justin’s senior year. In a family photo at right, Kyle (#10) and Justin (#5) posed on one of Indian Creek’s jersey day Fridays.

Coach Mike Gillin says he remembers Kyle “as one of the finest individuals I’ve been around” and quickly attributed that characterization to the athlete’s wholesomeness and strong family upbringing, alluding to Rob and Karen Ray.

“He was easy to coach all the way through. … We’ve kept in touch over the years, and I see him every once in a while. He brings back a lot of memories …”

Asked about his play as a strong safety on defense as a sophomore and junior, Kyle joked self-deprecatingly that he wasn’t fast enough to be a defensive cornerback, whose job usually is to stick close to wide receivers. Doing that requires a good amount of speed.

Safeties are usually responsible for either doubling coverage on a particularly good receiver, roaming the deep portion of the field when pass plays are expected on long-yardage downs or responding to wherever defensive support is needed on routine plays, which occasionally can involve safety blitzes.

Gillin credited Kyle for being analytical in attacking defenses when he did play quarterback. The coach had no doubt that Ray’s two years on defense – and knowing how to “read,” or understand, those defenses – helped Ray succeed in leading the Braves’ offense when he indeed became the starting quarterback in 2006.

Gillin remembers Ray’s physique as “wiry” when he first came out for the team as a freshman. But he said Kyle had matured physically and was over 6-feet tall (he was 6-2 when he started college) by the time he played his last two years. Justin Ray said his younger brother was always a solid tackler.

“He was very physical even as a sophomore,” Justin said, adding that his brother's good tackling ability was why coach Gillin had Kyle start as a sophomore in the Braves’ sectional game against Union County in 2004, a game the Braves won, 42-8.

Justin then chuckled and said, “He (Kyle) probably didn’t tell you this, but he did give up the (opponents’) only touchdown of the game!” He alluded to how Union County wide receiver Jordan Hunter got behind the Indian Creek secondary and hauled in a pass from Caleb Hackney for a 55-yard touchdown on Union County’s opening possession of the third quarter.

Justin neglected to mention that Kyle came into the Union County game briefly on offense later in the third quarter to spell starting quarterback Matt Rogers, who had come out with muscle spasms following a hard hit. Kyle promptly threw a 9-yard touchdown pass to Jake Scott, whose interception moments earlier had given the Braves the ball and a short field.

In fairness, Justin also didn’t mention that in the first half, Justin himself intercepted a Hackney pass, one of four Indian Creek interceptions on the night.

By the end of the 2005 season, their junior years of football, Kyle’s friend and teammate, Kolby Harrell, had yet to appear in a game for the Braves. At a team cookout at Coach Gillin’s home in summer 2006 before the start of Kyle, Caleb and Kolby's senior year, the coach gathered players together to discuss goals for the upcoming season.

Gillin asked each player to share their personal goals.

Kyle said Kolby told everyone that regardless of whether he ever played in a game, his goal was to be a good teammate and to do anything the team needed to win, a remark that fetched high praise from the coach. 

Kyle wasn't the only player on the team aware that his good friend hadn’t gotten into a game to see live action yet.

“Coach Gillin had a lot of respect for Kolby,” Kyle said, offering the possible theory that Gillin didn’t put Harrell on the field when the Braves had huge leads in the last quarter because Gillin felt he needed to protect Kolby, who was still physically slight at the time.

“Swimming was Kolby’s sport,” Kyle said (more on Kolby's swimming exploits in the Epilogue, which will follow the final chapter). “He played football for the sport and for the fun of it. He got the best enjoyment from just hanging out with all the guys.”

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

During Kyle's high school years, his parents and those of girlfriend Claire Freeman were supporting their children’s interest in dating each other, even though the two families lived some 50 miles apart. The Rays’ home along Lamb Lake in southern Johnson County, was 32 miles south of Indianapolis. Claire’s home was in Fishers, a Hamilton County suburb about 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis.

Claire remembers that she, Kyle and their parents would occasionally meet on the Southside of Indianapolis for dinner. Their favorite places there were Cracker Barrel, Texas Roadhouse and the former Jonathan Byrd Cafeteria, which was just south of Indianapolis in the northern Johnson County suburb of Greenwood. “Our families were great together. Very supportive,” she said.

Claire played basketball for a highly successful program at Heritage Christian High School, in northeast Indianapolis.

The Eagles won Class 2A championships in the Indiana High School Athletic Association postseason tournament in each of her four years there – 2006, ’07, ’08 and ’09. (The Eagles also had been state runner-up in 2005, the year before Claire entered high school.) In the state tournament championship game her senior year, she sank a field goal with 3 seconds left in overtime to seal the victory over Oak Hill, 60-58. She also was named that year’s tournament Most Valuable Player.

Claire was good enough on those teams to fetch college scholarship offers from such schools as Butler University in Indianapolis, Evansville (Ind.) University, Southern Illinois and Miami of Ohio. She ultimately chose Butler, largely because it was close to Kyle and both of their families, and she wanted them to be able to see her play without having to make a long, difficult commute.

And by Kyle’s senior year of high school, Claire was attending many of Kyle’s football and basketball games, and Kyle was going to many of Claire’s basketball games.

________________________________________________________________________________

Footnotes:

1 - In 2018, there was much publicity about how Mike Leonard, then Franklin College's head football coach, was approaching, equaled and then passed Faught's supposed career wins record of 120 at Franklin. (Leonard would finish with 129 wins when he stepped down after the 2019 season.) Franklin College officials have since discovered that 120 was not Faught's wins total at Franklin and have acknowledged that the 2018 publicity was unwarranted because Faught's wins total was, and has always been, nearly 40 more than what media reports cited in 2018. At the time, the only known resource claiming that Faught's career wins total at Franklin College was 120 is the Indiana Football Hall of Fame in its online member biography for Faught. While 120 was Faught's wins total at the time Faught was inducted into the IFHOF in 1981, Faught coached seven more seasons after his induction, winning 40 more games, but the Hall did not update his biographical information to reflect the post-induction wins, losses and ties when it carried over Faught's biographical data to his IFHOF online profile page (until summer 2025). The author knows of at least two other IFHOF members, Bud Wright of Sheridan and Mike Gillin, now of Mooresville, whose coaching wins records in their respective IFHOF biographies were in error when this series first published because they also were not current. Wright was inducted in 2002 and Gillin in 2014, also before they had finished coaching. In August 2025, the correct record for Faught finally was displayed in his IFHOF biography. But Mike Gillin’s member bio still contained outdated information and data.

2 - In four seasons at Iowa, 2004-09, J.R. Angle played in 62 games, starting four, and averaged 1.9 points, 1.1 rebounds and 0.4 assists per game. He was red-shirted in 2005-06. In his senior season at Indian Creek, he had averaged 27.3 points per game, ranking fourth in the state of Indiana. In the metro Indianapolis area, he was second only to the 36.2 ppg of Broad Ripple High School’s George Hill, who would go on to play college ball at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis followed by a 15-year pro career with NBA teams in San Antonio, Indiana, Utah, Sacramento, Cleveland, Oklahoma City and Milwaukee. Today, J.R. is an assistant basketball coach at Greenfield (Ind.) Central High School.

Tomorrow in Chapter 6: A Moonlight Graham Moment

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