Small school Beechwood plays big — no surprise — against Dixie Highway rival Dixie Heights

By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter

From the giant videoboard (with a sound system to match), to the college quality weight room and football facility to the new press box, the message here in Ft. Mitchell is that football matters. Friday night is a big deal at Edgar McNabb Stadium.

You may think you have Beechwood’s Tyler Fryman but you don’t as the speedster somehow turned this kickoff return into an 80-yard TD. (Photo by Dale Dawn)

As it was again this week when the underdog Class 5A Colonels of Dixie Heights headed three miles down the Dixie Highway looking for their first win against the small school with the big program, the unbeaten Class 2A Beechwood Tigers.

But it wasn’t always this way, even if a majority of this capacity crowd almost certainly couldn’t recall what football life was like in these Kenton County suburbs before Beechwood won its first of 18 state championships 42 years ago and didn’t look back.

Before Beechwood rolled out a team this season with a pair of Power 4 commits – Tyler Fryman headed to Kentucky and Emmett Queen on his way to Wake Forest.

Before it played a shaky first half on the way to a 41-3 win over a Dixie Heights team that fell to 0-3 despite giving Beechwood all it could handle the first two quarters.

“They gave us all kinds of fits that first half,” said Noel Rash, back after three years of retirement for his second stint at Beechwood after winning eight state titles in nine championship game appearances. Just another way this Beechwood program has its act together. No rookie coach for the Tigers.

He’s back. And is Noel Rash ever having a good time on the Beechwood sideline. (Photo by Dale Dawn)

Rash wasn’t the only one who felt this way. “I thought we played good football, good defensive football,” Dixie Heights head coach Pat Burke told his team, although adding that they can’t “melt down” when penalties or mistakes happen.

And while they may not remind folks of the days of legendary coaches like Rice Mountjoy and Bill Shannon when the big county school Colonels had their pick of players from Bromley to Taylor Mill, Park Hills to Crescent Springs to Edgewood, they gave what they had here.

And made the Tigers work for it, which is exactly what Fryman did after picking up the bouncing first kickoff, returning it 80 yards through a half-dozen broken tackles, spinning through a couple of 360 degree moves, and simply refusing to go down as he left Colonel arms flailing before beating them down the sidelines with his speed for a score after just 18 seconds were gone in the game.

“I was just trying to get them off me,” said Fryman, who declined to rate the run as his career best. He doesn’t compare ‘em, he just does ‘em. “I’d say it was a good one,” he did say. But he’s not getting caught up looking back at it. “It’s on to the next one,” he said. Which came in the second quarter on an easy three-yard jaunt into the end zone.

Beechwood’s Garrison Wilson, scoring here, gives the Tigers a second power back. (Photo by Dale Dawn)

Fryman wasn’t alone. He had company running the ball into the end zone as senior Nathan Pabst busted a 40-yard TD up the gut before catching a 10-yard pass from Emmett Queen, who also hit a wide-open Cale Arrasmith from 51 yards out for the game’s final score.

But newcomer Garrison Wilson, a 5-foot-9, 195-pound junior is a big development for Beechwood, allowing the Tigers not to have to depend on Pabst alone for the inside run game.

“That’s a huge plus for us,” Rash says. “He’s just blossomed.”

Another who has is junior middle linebacker Landry Queen, coming back from a knee injury.’

But as much as his players put up points and tackles, it was the way they got it together at halftime that pleased Rash. “They made the adjustments,” so much so that Rash said he liked this game better than last week’s 42-0 romp over highly-touted Cincinnati Indian Hill. Especially the way they reacted to the reaming out that Rash administered at halftime.

“You gotta’ fall in love with the heat, gotta’ fall in love with the grind,” Rash told his guys for a game that kicked off – as all Beechwood games do — at 7:30, a decision to allow fans and families time to get to the games. On this night, it also allowed the temperature on an all-time record-setting Sept. 4 in Greater Cincinnati to be down to 81 at kickoff.