The NKyTribune is offering focused coverage of NKY high school football throughout the season, thanks to support from St. Elizabeth Healthcare Sports Medicine. See all our pre-season features on each of NKY’s 21 high school football teams and follow our coverage, including roundups each week, at Northern Kentucky High School Football.
By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
When the Cooper and Ryle football teams faced off in the opening game of the high school season the last four years, the only thing at stake was bragging rights between the two neighboring schools located in the suburbs of Boone County.
This year, the game has taken on a whole new meaning. Cooper and Ryle are now Class 6A district rivals and the team that wins Friday’s showdown will have a better chance of hosting a first-round game in the playoffs.
Kickoff is set for 7:30 p.m. Friday at Cooper.
“I’m sure this game has been circled on (Ryle’s) schedule since the beginning of the year and it’s been circled on mine since last year,” said Cooper coach Randy Borchers. “Once we knew we were going to be in 6A (district) with them and Conner, it became two games we’ve got to win. Everything up to this point is just us trying to get better so when we play those guys we’re hitting on all cylinders.”
Cooper will enter Friday’s game with a 5-2 record that includes dominating wins over Dixie Heights (35-7) and Lexington Catholic (28-0) the last two weeks. But neither of those opponents has a high-powered offense like the 6-0 Ryle Raiders, who are averaging 491 yards and 44.5 points per game.
Borchers said his team doesn’t plan to get into an offensive shootout with Ryle. He wants to have the Jaguars control the tempo of the game with sustained possessions that produce the points necessary to come out on top.
“The big thing is we’ve got to find ways to score more in the red zone,” Borchers said. “We’ve had the ball multiple times in the red zone and once we get down there we shoot ourselves in the foot. We have a penalty or a missed assignment and it takes us out of what we want to do. If we do that Friday, we won’t win.”
Cooper has developed a much more balanced offensive attack with the emergence of first-year quarterback Nathan Brown. In the last two games combined, he has thrown for more than 570 yards and seven touchdowns.
Brown played quarterback as a freshman and then moved to wide receiver for two years. While he was making the transition back to his original position earlier this season, opponents would often focus on stopping Cooper’s running game. But all that changed in the last two weeks.
“That’s how we usually do it, run the ball and play good defense, but it wasn’t working out so we started passing it more,” Brown said. “I was fine with that. I just had to get used to (throwing) it again.”
In the last two games, junior wide receiver Dante Hendrix caught six of the seven TD passes thrown by Brown. Last Friday, Hendrix scored on pass plays covering 39, 82 and 67 yards. He finished the game with 250 yards on eight catches.
Hendrix is now Cooper’s team leader in scoring with 54 points and pass receiving with 31 catches for 772 yards. He also has a team-high four interceptions as a defensive back.
“It feels good,” he said of putting up those numbers. “Our coach says big-time players need to make big-time plays to help us win and that’s what I try to do every game.”
Hendrix is one of several two-way starters for the Jaguars. They’ll be playing a Ryle team that has separate units on offense and defense. That’s another reason Borchers wants his offense to control the tempo of the game, and the Brown-to-Hendrix passing threat could be crucial to his game plan.
“This year, we feel like we’re keeping (opponents) on their heels,” Borchers said. “If you’re going to come up and stop the run, we feel like we can beat you deep with Dante. If you’re going to try and stop the pass and double cover Dante, we feel like we can hurt you with the run and we also have other receivers that we can go to. But, up to this point, they haven’t been able to shut down Dante yet.”
Hendrix said the atmosphere at school this week already has the Cooper players fired up for Friday’s district game. The fact that Ryle is favored to win based on state polls and power rankings adds to the pre-game hype.
“Coach Borchers has stressed to us how big this game is,” Hendrix said. “If we win, it can help us later in the playoffs. If we lose, it’s not going to end our season and we’re not going to drop our heads. But we definitely want to come out of this game with a win.”
Nearly every game on this week’s Northern Kentucky high school football schedule is between district rivals. Those matchups include:
THURSDAY
Ludlow at Dayton (Class 1A)
FRIDAY
Beechwood at Bellevue (Class 1A)
Brossart at Bracken County (Class 1A)
Newport Central Catholic at Holy Cross (Class 2A)
Newport at Lloyd (Class 2A)
Walton-Verona at Gallatin County (Class 2A)
Holmes at Bourbon County (Class 4A)
Dixie Heights at Highlands (Class 5A)
Simon Kenton at Boone County (Class 6A)
Ryle at Cooper (Class 6A)
SATURDAY
Grant County at Covington Catholic (Class 5A)