By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
They come from 16 states and the District of Columbia — from places as disparate as Rancho Cucamonga and Vero Beach, Sioux Falls and Philadelphia.
They come to Highland Heights to play for the Kentucky Barrels in the Arena Football One league whose nine teams call Everett, Washington, Redmond, Oregon and Oceanside, Calif., home on the West Coast. Back in the Midwest, there are Saginaw in Michigan and Duluth in Minnesota. Heading South, there’s Nashville in Tennessee and Beaumont in Texas. And up in old New York, there’s Albany.
And here they are on the NKU campus where one trip around this league could get you part of the way to your geography degree.
Just ask Cedric Walker, head coach of these new Kentucky Barrels, now a proud resident of Cold Spring, but a veteran of nine stops in the Arena world, as he ticks ever one of them off, from San Jose to Green Bay, from Baltimore to Billings.
“We won the championship there in 2024,” the longtime Arena defensive star says of his time in Montana. And he doesn’t mind the moves, the Lufkin, Tex. native and the Stephen F. Austin alum says. “You get to meet a lot of nice people.”
“I love it here,” says his wife, Summer Singer, a Washington State native who runs the Barrels’ office and does sales for the team. “We’re staying here a while . . . this is the most beautiful place we’ve been.”
With a brand new artificial turf field down on Truist Arena’s floor for Thursday’s open practice introducing the Barrels to their fans, the place looks pretty spiffy.
“I could have gotten a used turf,” says owner Corey Cunningham, the former Oak Hills High basketball player and NKU alum turned IT mogul with his Prestige Worldwide software company.
“I may have gone overboard a bit,” Cunningham says of sticking to his team’s Year 1 budget as he oversees the back and forth with the fans in the stands on this day. “The assistant to the general manager,” he calls himself, pointing Walker’s way for the GM, “we kind of tag-team it.”
“We’re not where we need to be,” Walker says, sounding like every football coach everywhere 10 days before the first kickoff (Sunday, April 12, 5 p.m. against the Michigan Arsenal at Truist). And true to those words, Walker threatened three times to “start practice over,” when the proper focus wasn’t there. “Attention to details,” he said.
But he does like this about his team: “We compete,” he says, “and we’re very athletic.” Two of those athletes are Kentuckians.
Quarterback Dalton Oliver, a big personality guy from Muhlenberg County by way of Kentucky Wesleyan and four years with Nashville is the first one to greet you and last one to say goodbye.
He used to combine teaching with his Arena career “but you can make enough you don’t have to.” His offseason profession now? “I flip houses,” he says.
And from the scrimmage, he looks ready to flip the football down the field. “Our offense is 93 percent passing,” Oliver says of the eight-man game with three receivers – one of them the man in motion flying toward the line of scrimmage at the snap with three offensive linemen and a fullback. And one of those offensive linemen can wave his arm out of the huddle and become an eligible receiver at tight end.
Which is where the lone Northern Kentuckian on the roster comes in. That would be 6-foot-6, 320-pound Dhane Montgomery, who played football, basketball and baseball at Carroll County and then starred at Campbellsville where he got to face Thomas More three times.
“I took up self-promoting,” he says of the way he emailed Walker to give him a chance. And now he’s found a home here as part of a team that’s living together in an NKU dorm for the season. “I love it here,” says Dhane, whose hometown Carrollton family and friends gave him by far the loudest ovation during the team introductions. So loud the MC gave him two encores.
Oliver likes the look of this team that will be allowed a game-day roster of 21 players with three additional on the inactive roster. He points to Middletown, Ohio’s Jalin Marshall, whose wide receiver career at Ohio State earned him NFL time with the New York Jets.
He’s one of four Barrels with NFL experience. O-lineman Ryan Johnson Sr., from Youngstown State, played with New England and Tampa Bay. D-lineman Ezekiel Rose went from West Virgina to the Baltimore Ravens. And defensive back Joe Powell played with the NY Giants and the Buffalo Bills.
“I like where we are,” Oliver says. “We’re pretty far along.”
What Walker likes is the leaders he has – three of them on defense, which he oversees. “It starts there,” Walker says.
Just as “it all starts here in 10 days,” Cunningham told the fans before calling them down to the field for an autograph session.