By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
The Owensboro Catholic assistant was not happy. On the way down from the press box to the field with less than three minutes left in the Class 2A state championship game, his unbeaten Aces trailed Beechwood by two touchdowns.
“They’ve got some good players,” he was told of the Tigers. It happens. He wasn’t having any of it. “No, we’ve got better players. We’re the better team.”
By the time the elevator hit the ground floor at UK’s Kroger Field, Beechwood had scored again as streaking linebacker Jack Meier picked off an onside kick and took it untouched into the end zone.
Beechwood 50, soon-to-be-no-longer-unbeaten Owensboro Catholic 28 with a score as the clock hit 0:00 to make it a 50-34 final.
The word out of Owensboro this week was that Beechwood’s now 14-1 Tigers with their 18th state championship tucked away, were a “track team.”
Beechwood did not take kindly to those remarks. Although they were the state’s Class A track champs with all the dash gold medalists on the field and did not really object to someone talking about their speed.
But this is the fall. And Beechwood’s sport is football.
“We didn’t give ourselves a chance to win this thing,” Owensboro Catholic coach Jason Morris said after a second straight championship game shootout loss.
Right from the get-go, as it turned out. The Aces won the toss and took the ball, accustomed to having their way against a schedule where they’d outscored their 14 opponents by an average 45.9-9.1. Beechwood gave the ball to them all right, as junior placekicker Colson Lair blasted the first of his six straight kickoffs into the end zone. No returning those.
With 9:40 left in the first half, Beechwood led 14-0 on a pair of Chase Flaherty two-yard TD runs. Which is notable because Flaherty – one of 16 Beechwood seniors playing their final game — missed last week’s playoff game with a sprained ankle and that was “the first time I ran all week,” he said, when he hit the field for pregame warmups. “I might as well give it my all,” he figured.
Four touchdowns were as “all” in as Flaherty could be as he got backup from sophomore Nathan Pabst, another one of those “track” guys, who hit on a 33-yard TD romp. Also scoring from distance was sophomore baseball/football speedster Tyler Fryman, who ran one in from 36 yards out as he completely reversed field and beat the Ace defenders to the end zone.
“Their team speed wore on us,” Owensboro Catholic’s Morris said. “No excuses.”
And no getting away from the fact that the Aces have some terrific players. Brady Atwell, their 6-3, 225-pound quarterback, threw for 366 yards and two TDs on 24 of 49 passing and one interception that went off his receivers’ hands and into the hands of Beechwood’s Luke Erdman who returned it 63 yards to set up the Tigers’ second TD.
Give OC credit, the Aces with Dereon Crowe catching 11 for 161 yards and one TD didn’t go down quietly. But a Beechwood team that dedicated itself to getting back to this game they’d won as sophomores was not going to leave anything on frigid Kroger Field, where game temperature was 27.
For head coach Jay Volker, who kidded that he was afraid a year ago in his first season without a state championship at the Ft. Mitchell powerhouse that he’d get fired, it was a chance to feel what all those great coaches before him the previous half-century – Bernie Barre, Mike Yeagle, Noel Rash – had felt.
These guys all gave something up for this moment, Volker said. This wasn’t about him. Flaherty, who ran it 24 times for 76 yards, gave up playing defense. “We wanted to save him.” And Meier, the kickoff TD return guy, “changed his body” to go from a nose guard “to a linebacker who led our defense.”
And quarterback Clay Hayden, a senior like Flaherty and Meier, didn’t get to put up the same numbers this year as he shared the ball around to Beechwood’s many weapons. But “Clay didn’t care,” Volker said, “he’s in the locker room holding up that trophy and taking pictures.”
Call this “a legacy win,” Volker said, with a nod to how lucky he was to be able to step into a place with as much support and tradition as the folks in Ft. Mitchell greeted him with.
And finally, just a word of caution for football coaches. If you haven’t won a state title ever and have lost every single time you reached the championship game, and you’re playing against a program that’s won 17 of them, best not make them mad. Best not to talk about their “track” speed.
Because in this one, Beechwood “ran” the ball 42 times for 219 yards to OC’s 22 carries for 97. And ran it in for six TDs from scrimmage and that 50-yarder on Meier’s kickoff return.
Can the Tigers run? Yep. All the way to another state title.
And you really did have to feel sorry for the Aces’ postgame tears. They were not expecting this. They were devastated.
“We knew from middle school on how much talent we had,” said Vince Carrico, OC’s leading tackler with more than 800 in his high school career, “and we were going to win a state championship.”
But they would have to beat Beechwood to do so.
And the Tigers, in front of a chilled crowd of 7,604, said “No.”
SCORING SUMMARY
OWENSBORO CATH (14-1) 34
BEECHWOOD (14-1) 50
BEECHWOOD: Flaherty 2 run (PAT) Lair kick good
BEECHWOOD: Flaherty 2 run (PAT) Lair kick good
OWENSBORO CATH: Ebelhar 20 pass from Atwell (PAT) Garvin kick good
BEECHWOOD: Flaherty 3 run (PAT) Lair kick good
OWENSBORO CATH: Crowe 1 run (PAT) Garvin kick good
BEECHWOOD: Flaherty 33 run (PAT) Lair kick good
BEECHWOOD: Fryman 33 run (PAT) Lair kick good
OWENSBORO CATH: Atwell 1 run (PAT) Garvin kick good
BEECHWOOD: Flaherty 1 run (PAT) Lair kick good
OWENSBORO CATH: Crowe 1 pass from Atwell (PAT) Garvin kick good
BEECHWOOD: Meier 50 kickoff return (PAT) Pabst pass from Hayden
OWENSBORO CATH: Atwell 5 run (No PAT)
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @dweber3440.
