24 Hours Of Football: "Everyone Did Their Part To Have Six Games."
As Barrington and Prospect High Schools play for the Mid-Suburban League championship, players and coaches reflect on a season filled with anxiety and joy
(Photo Credit: Daily Herald)
Over a 24-hour period from last Friday night through last Saturday, The Kerr Report publisher Jon J. Kerr attended two conference championship football games, the first being the Mid-Suburban League in Barrington followed by the DuKane Conference title game played at Huskie Stadium in DeKalb. This is the first of two articles from those games from the MSL title game. The second, about the DuKane Conference, will be published Wednesday.
The lights shined brightly from both fields at Barrington High School Friday night, dimming the sunset from the west.
Northeast of the football field, Wish Field, rests the softball field, the scenic “Field of Dreams,” as the playing surface is affectionately called by the sport’s players and coaches.
Sometime in the second half of Barrington’s football game against Prospect High School Friday night, the lights emanating from softball’s “Field of Dreams’ turned off.
The strangely timed shutdown could be classified as a pragmatic signal to all spectators inside football’s Wish Field; that what they were watching right in front of them commanded their full attention.
Due to the unprecedented nature of the 2021 spring football season in Illinois, more space will likely be needed to be built out over summer break for trophy cases or on walls of achievement at schools all over the state.
Barrington and Prospect High Schools will forever share one ALL CAPS milestone—2021 Spring Season Mid-Suburban Bowl Co-Participants.
Because the Broncos were winners of the MSL West Division, and the Knights winners of the MSL East Division, Friday’s game took on historic proportions.
Not since 1974 had the MSL played a true conference championship game.
It took the crazy, unbundled, random nature of a spring season for the significance of the match up to be realized.
However the game came together, based on its outcome, a 52-45 Barrington win, it worked out where the league’s two best teams were on the field when it mattered most.
Barrington head coach Joe Sanchez said it a few different ways in our post game conversation, yet the theme of his words rang consistent.
His roster of 60 or so players, while talented, navigated a six-game season unscathed because they were able to play all six games.
While teams all over the Chicagoland area got contact traced and quarantined out of a full season, the Broncos stayed true to the mission statement spoken by Sanchez the first day of workouts.
Control the controllables. Those who do will reap the rewards.
“We talked a lot this week about what they’ve been through and how easy it would have been when we got back together in January, how easy it would have been not to believe, to not be fully committed, to take the easy route,” Sanchez said. “They stayed committed to each other and the vision of what this season could be. Here we are.”
(Photo Credit: 365 Barrington)
For a large chunk of Sanchez’s 19 seasons as head coach, the Broncos have consistently been on the fringes of the Class 8A elite—good for a quarterfinal playoff run almost every season but not quite in the class of Loyola Academy, Lincoln-Way East, Maine South or Marist, programs that make the final four or compete in state title games with regularity.
The spring 2021 Broncos could have been that team to break through to the semis or title game if the season had been played when it was supposed to be played, in the late summer and fall months of 2020.
Led by a dynamic running back in Bryan Smith and strong-armed quarterback Peter Anderson, Barrington put forth a stunning offensive display of football in the first half against Prospect.
Consider these two numbers—in their first 11 plays, the Broncos scored 35 points.
“I’ve never been a part of something like that,” offensive coordinator Todd Kuklinski said of the team’s staggering field goal-per-play statistical output.
The match up featuring so much offensive talent on both teams underscores another unintended consequence of Covid.
Under-recruited athletes.
During the Broncos first offensive possession, Anderson, a right-handed quarterback, made a throw across his body from the wide side of the field that was caught by another speedy running back, Ryan Smith, who caught the ball just before a defender could get there and once Smith secured the pass, he bolted 58 yards for a touchdown. In order for the ball to get to Smith before the defender could knock it down or pick it off, the throw required a bullet-slinging trigger man.
Anderson, 6-foot-2, 195 pounds, is an Augustana College recruit. Bryan Smith, a senior running back who finished the game with 261 yards rushing on 14 carries, remains uncommitted.
Prospect running back Luke Zardzin, who zigged and zagged his way around Broncos defenders for 242 yards on the ground, is walking on at Northern Illinois this fall. The Knights quarterback, Gary Moeller, who completed 31 passes for 300 yards against Barrington, is doing the same at the University of Wisconsin.
It’s incomprehensible to anyone who watched Friday’s game with their own eyes how these players are not in a better college position. But when analyzed through the lens of a non-college visit, non-evaluation camp lockdown Covid year, the reality, while unfortunate for them, becomes more intellectually explainable.
“They (Augustana) are getting a gem because of the situation we are in,” Kuklinski said of Anderson. “Bryan Smith should be playing college football right now. Joey (Gurskis, a senior wide receiver who caught an 87-yard touchdown pass from Anderson in the frenetic first quarter), all these seniors are caught in limbo because the (college) rosters are full and seniors are staying behind and it’s just a situation where it’s not good for anyone.”
If unable to watch in person (the NCAA dead period runs through May 31), college coaches should have caught the live stream.
A 35-21 Barrington halftime lead featured eight straight scoring possessions and 603 yards of total offense.
The second half found the Broncos in an advantageous position and the Knights playing catch up. They almost did as a touchdown and safety trimmed the seemingly insurmountable deficit to 42-37 as the game moved to the fourth quarter. Then, with 4:37 left, Moeller threw a touchdown pass to Greg Olsen look-alike tight end Tyson Splinter, another under recruited ‘21 graduate, and the game was tied at 45.
From the opening play, the game contained all the characteristics of a classic shoot out, where last possession wins.
When Ryan Smith ran six yards into the end zone to make the score 52-45 Broncos, the time remaining, 1:49, allowed the Knights one more counter punch possession.
But a desperate throw from Moeller was picked off by the Broncos’ Jackson Gehrisch just in front of the Barrington goal line with 30 seconds left, ending any chance of one more Prospect touchdown and a potential go-for-two-and-the-win decision for the Knights’ coach, Dan DeBoeuf.
How’s this for a smack-your-forehead-I-can’t-believe-it stat—the teams combined for 1,074 in total offense.
How one looks at that four-digit number is a matter of perspective. One might see it simply as indifference to defense. Another might say it’s two programs that play the style of ball that fits their personnel.
I say it proves high school football is alive and well in Illinois, a delightfully entertaining show, in spite of all the year’s obstacles.
“It was just two great teams going at it. We ended up making one extra play more than they did,” Sanchez said.
(Photo Credit: Chicago Sun-Times)
When I caught up with Anderson, the Barrington quarterback, he didn’t appear to be a young man thinking about what he’s missed over the last 13 months.
No, rather, he wore the face of a kid—wide-eyed, unflappable and ultimately, satisfied—who knew he accomplished something meaningful in his final high school game.
After Anderson explained the spattering of blood marks on his right hand with typical teenage intrepid gallantry (“Oh, yeah, I got cleated”) he answered a question about sacrifice and the meaning of playing a six-game season with no interruptions.
“Every day the coaches kept reminding us that we have to be smart with who we hang out with and how many people we hare hanging out with. Everyone on the team did their part and so we are safe to have our six games,” Anderson said. “We just battled and stood together and showed everyone Barrington is the real deal. I’m proud of my brothers for putting in the work.”
In April 2021, when Anderson says “work” he’s not just talking about practice reps and power cleans. He’s talking about social bubbles and avoidance; of remote learning and saliva swabs.
Sanchez spoke of the unique anxiety he felt as a coach this spring season that had nothing to do with football.
“Every day you are waiting. You don’t know what that message is going to be when I opened it up,” Sanchez said. “Especially when you saw it going on all around us. You saw it happen in the Fox Valley and those poor guys. Burlington Central literally on the bus ride there lost a game.”
When the 2021 spring football Barrington Broncos gathered for a final team photo—complete with MSL conference championship plaque—for them all to get to that moment, both of the following had to be true.
They got lucky. Not the typical avoidance-of-injury-to-your-starting-quarterback lucky, but Covid lucky.
None of their opponents got contact traced out of that week’s game, prompting a cancellation. None of Barrington’s players forced a public health-ordered mass quarantine. What took place Friday night would not have been possible if either had happened.
While some luck was involved, most of Friday night had to do with choice, and what a group of young men do when given certain choices. We can argue they should not have had to make those choices, the ones that drove them further away from a normalized existence, but those were the cards dealt.
Well after the game ended, end-of-year-hugs given and taken, mothers snapping their dozens of iPhone images for posterity, Sanchez glanced at the scene in front of him and expressed the one feeling that overwhelmed him in the moment.
That of gratitude.
“For all intents and purposes this is the first MSL Super Bowl for our school and it may be the only one if it is never played again. These guys did it under circumstances they never thought they’d do it. For them, for these coaches to stay committed this entire time,” Sanchez said. “If everything goes the way we hope it goes, this will be the only spring football season ever. Let’s hope. Unbelievable memory.”
It was almost 10 p.m. when I pulled out of the parking lot adjacent to Wish Field. Small gatherings still remained, the stadium lights still fully lit.
No one wanted to go home.
TRK will publish Part 2 of “24 Hours of Football” for subscribers Wednesday morning