Hays continues to remain top WAC football team

Liberal turnaround earns Luetters Coach of Year honor

It’s something that Tony Crough could only envision when he took over the head coaching reins at Hays High School six years ago.

At the time, the Indians’ football fortunes had fallen off and Crough came with a winning pedigree at previous stops.

Over the past four seasons, the Indians have either won the Western Athletic Conference outright or shared it each year, and the recently completed 2023 was another where they held the outright title.

The recent title didn’t come without its challenges, and Crough would be the first to tell you this.

Early in the season, the Indians lost a critical home game in overtime, 24-21, to Garden City. In a twist of irony, Garden City is where Crough cut his teeth on the game, playing for legendary coach Dave Meadows, graduating in 1999 and having played in the 1998 Class 6A state championship game at quarterback.

The Indians rebounded with wins over Dodge City after having a narrow victory over another WAC rival, Great Bend. That would set the stage for the final regular season game on the road at Liberal, a team that was undefeated and enjoying its best season in two decades.

It took double overtime, but the Indians prevailed 48-41, and with the head-to-head tiebreaker in play, Hays would be declared the WAC champion at 3-1, the same as Liberal. In a tightly-bunched season, Great Bend and Garden City went 2-2 with Great Bend getting third based upon the same tiebreak after defeating Garden City in the regular season finale.

“We talk about several key goals before each season,” Crough said. “And the WAC is the first one. After that, we want to go as far in the playoffs as possible. The biggest thing for me is to see improvement in the team and individual players from preseason to the end of the season.”

Crough said he believes that to be a consistent winner, a program must be built from the ground floor up, starting in youth football and continuing through middle school.

“I think each class we’ve had has taken on the attitude of not wanting to let anybody down, or to be the team that doesn’t win,” Crough said. “I think you can get a little cautious in telling yourself that you’ve done this before and just settle for that, or you can tell yourself and your players that it is a new season and what happened before doesn’t really matter. What we’ve done lately is the thing that matters the most.”

Crough said the Liberal game was perhaps one of the most exciting regular season games in which he has coached.

“It was such a big game and it could have gone either way,” Crough said. “Liberal had a heckuva team and it took a great effort by our kids to win that one. We just somehow found a way. We know how big it was for Liberal since they came in undefeated.”

Crough said the overall balance of the WAC was never more evident than in the 2023 season. Close games (a 28-27 win against Great Bend in OT), and the loss to Garden City (24-21, also OT) and then the double-overtime victory at Liberal. Only Dodge City didn’t provide a stern test.

“I would tell you, though, that Dodge City was a couple of injuries away from being very competitive,” Crough said. “Top to bottom, it was a very balanced year for all the teams.”

This year’s edition had a lot of new faces in the starting lineup after the Indians graduated its second straight big senior class.

“I’d say this team’s qualities were energy, enthusiasm and excitement,” Crough said. “They were young, naïve and without a lot of experience. I think at the start of the season we weren’t sure they were supposed to win. But they just went out and won.”

Crough has never been one to dodge a tough schedule and he got as much as he could wish for in the early going, playing always tough 6A Junction City, then taking on defending 6A state champion Manhattan and then the tough WAC games with Great Bend and Garden City.

“I thought we could go anywhere from 0-4, to 1-3, to 2-2, or 3-1,” Crough stated. “We finished that stretch 2-2 and I was pleased with that.”

The starting roster was dotted with youth, Crough said, having two freshmen and eight sophomores playing on either side of the ball.

“Our older kids, the juniors and seniors, had not had much varsity experience, either,” Crough said. “They collectively came together and managed to do a good job of winning key games.”

Crough goes back to his high school days in Garden City, and playing for Meadows, to explain his coaching philosophy.

“You must develop discipline in different ways and build a winning culture,” Crough said. “I think Coach Meadows convinced us that whether we were supposed to win on paper didn’t matter. You just have to go out and find a way to get it done.”

Liberal’s Luetters guides Redskins’ turnaround season

When Bryan Luetters, who had played his high school football in Dodge City, guided the Meade Buffaloes to an 8-Player Division I state championship in 2021, he figured he might just be at the small southwest Kansas school for many years.

But success in the ocaching profession has a way of changing the best-laid plans. A phone call from Liberal High School Athletic Director Kerri Miles to inquire about an interest in that school’s football coaching opening, was the catapult that moved Luetters just a little further southwest.

Now, in just his second season with the Redskins, Luetter saw a transformation that resulted a resurgence that produced an 8-2 season record, the first postseason playoff win in two decades and being voted the Western Athletic Conference Coach of the Year.

The only thing missing from the Luetters accomplishment list this year was winning the WAC. The Redskins did finish at 3-1, the same record as Hays, but in the head-to-head tiebreaker, the championship went to Hays following a dramatic 48-41 double-overtime victory by the Indians in the final week of the regular season.

Still, there were many reasons to celebrate the new dawn of successful football in the Class 5A school.

Football historians and fans have to go back more than two decades to recall the glory days of Liberal when Gary Cornelsen guided the program to four state championships (all 5A) in the 1990s and three other state championship game appearances (a record seven consecutive seasons). Cornelsen had compiled a 118-17 record during his tenure, but in the intervening two decades, those six coaches posted a won-loss mark of 65-106. Luetters is now a modest 11-8 in two seasons.

“I knew that Liberal had been successful many years ago,” said Luetters, who played for Dodge’s Dick Masters back in the 1990s. “But I also knew they had not been successful for quite some time.”

Putting it mildly, the Redskins had gone through seven head coaches in 20 seasons, and those had compiled just three winning seasons, two of those back-to-back in 2004 and 2005 when Steve Warner coached the program. Warner eventually went to Buhler where he has earned legendary status.

“When I arrived, there was a lot of mental issues facing the team,” Luetters said. “First, we had to get into the weight room and get stronger. Second, we had to then use the weight room to also improve our mental toughness. We had been behind in so many games in recent years and basically just given up.

“We had to transform their thought process. Rather than saying that’s the way it’s always been, we had to teach them that it didn’t have to be that way.”

Mental reps in the weight room became the daily norm, Luetters said. Day-by-day, week-by-week from a 3-6 record in his first year of 2022, the Redskins saw incremental progress.

In the 2023 season, rather than fold the tent when falling behind early, the Redskins found ways to reverse course, and rally to win several games in the first part of the season.

“There were a lot of discipline issues we had to fix,” Luetters said. “If a kid was late to practice, or to a .meeting, there had to be consequences. Once they figured that out, things improved. We had to hold everybody to the same standards.”

Prior to the start of this year, Luetters said he had a few upperclassmen who had yet to buy into the new system and philosophy.

“It became like a cancer, so we just dismissed them and things got so much better,” Luetters recalled. “Everybody was headed in the same direction.”

Luetters took little credit for the team’s turnaround, but instead lavished praise on his assistant coaches, with all 10 of them being 26 years of age or younger.

“They all come with experience in their own positions on the team,” Luetters said. “They come up with a lot of suggestions, we discuss them and if they make sense, we . them. Everybody has a voice.”

Luetters also had positive thoughts about his remaining upperclassmen of juniors and seniors.

“We started weights at 6 a.m. because there’s just no conflicts with anything else,” Luetters said. “This group became great leaders.”

Despite losing his quarterback in WAC Player of the Year Brooks Kappelman, Luetters will have 15 starters returning for the 2024 campaign. He can’t wait to get back at it and see where the Redskins will take their next trip in this journey.

“I’m a southwest Kansas kid and it’s exciting to see these kids finally achieve a level of success,” Luetters said. “There’s still more that we can do to improve, but this was a big step.”

2023 All-Conference Football