casey hines
Sectional
Sectional
The sectional draw in Indiana is one of my favorite times in Indiana high school football. It is single elimination tournament where schools are paired with other schools that have similar enrollments. Pioneer’s classification was single A which is the smallest class in Indiana. The Panthers drew Lafayette Central Catholic for the first sectional game on October 24th 1997. I don’t remember much about this game. Lafayette Central Catholic is a private school that has had tremendous football success in with 7 state titles in 1A football. They would soon become one of Pioneer’s biggest tests of the 2000’s. Their success has been somewhat skewed because many people believe that they recruit football players and keep their enrollment to a minimum so they can continue to win titles. This changed a few years back with the success factor. The success factor means that if they continued to win, they would get moved up to class 2A. They have bounced back and forth between 2A and 1A in recent years, but have not found the tournament success in 2A that they had in 1A. In 1997 Lafayette Central Catholic was no match for the Panthers. Pioneer would go on to beat the Knights with a 36-16 score and moved to round two of the sectional. Lafayette CC would go on to win the state title in 1999. The next game was North White. They were state champs in 1994, but did not have the players from that team on their 1997 squad. Pioneer would go on to roll the Vikings with a score of 34-14. The Panthers were in their first school history sectional championship pitted against a formidable foe. The Carroll Cougars had great success in 1995 with a state title and 1996 with a state runner up. This could be a challenge for the Panthers. I remember Coach Johnson saying he had a vision of our free safety picking off a pass and running it back for a touchdown. I thought it was bunk. Who has visions of people running back an interception for a touchdown? It is hard enough to get an interception, let alone a pick six. Carroll had beat Pioneer in 1996 in the sectional and we had hung with them for a half, but got handled in the second half. 1997 would be a different outcome with the Panthers beating the Carroll Cougars with a score of 42-6. This was the first sectional title in Pioneer history. This was also the first time I started watching a television station out of Lafayette because they had clips of the game and I just thought it was amazing that Pioneer was on TV. We did have newspaper coverage from the Logansport paper, but I had never seen us on the Friday Night Frenzy. There we were, on TV. There was no internet at this time in our small town, so the media coverage was the newspaper, radio, and my favorite Saturday morning show on a Logansport radio station called the coaches’ corner. A local diner called the Burger Barn would give the coaches’ free breakfast and sponsor this show every Saturday morning. This is where Cass County coaches would recap the games from the previous evening. Each coach would get about 15 minutes to discuss highlights or lowlights from the previous game. I just never saw the Friday Night Frenzy and we would begin taping it on our VCR so I could watch it over and over. It was inconceivable to me that we just won a sectional championship. We started getting the red carpet rolled out for us with pep rallies, Thursday night dinners made by the moms group, and lots of newspaper coverage.