Sun staff
New Richmond head coach Josh Stratton knew what was going on across town at Norwood’s Shea Stadium as he coached his Lions to a comfortable 38-0 win over Clermont Northeastern on Friday, Oct. 24, but he didn’t fill his players in until they were back on campus at New Richmond later that night.
“When we pulled into New Richmond, I stood up on the bus and let (the players) know that Norwood had beaten Western (Brown) and we’d be playing for a share of the league title,” Stratton explained. “That fired them up pretty good and they’ve been pretty motivated since. They came in Saturday with a little more pep in their step than they’ve had in a while. I think they just needed to know that they were playing for something more than win seven.”
The Lions’ quest for ‘win seven’ will come against a team in Norwood who already has seven wins to their credit and a share of the Southern Buckeye Conference American Division locked up. New Richmond, who is 6-3 overall and 2-1 in the SBC, will be the team with everything to gain.
“It’s week 10 senior night, so that always adds a little angst to the environment as well,” Stratton said. “Our seniors are excited about the things going on this week. We have a big team event — a Halloween party and cookout. We have senior speeches and some fun stuff going on, but the fact that we’re playing for a conference title… they were really focused. When you’re playing for a championship, you have a little different focus.”
The prospect of adding a league championship to the Lions’ record-keeping wall in the field house wasn’t always a guarantee for this group, especially after they dropped two of their first three games of the season.
An opening-night loss to Indian Hill and the subsequent loss to Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy two weeks later exposed some problems the Lions had moving the ball and finding the end zone despite a defensive unit that was exceeding expectations.
“It’s been a strange year, for sure. We’ve struggled all year to find an offensive identity, other than the fact that Tyler Anderson was going to get the football,” Stratton expounded, foreshadowing a move that would prove to cure the offensive identity crisis. “Our system was set up to have a running quarterback or an exceptional throwing quarterback and we really didn’t have either of those things, so we decided to put Tyler at quarterback, put another good running back back there with him and some- -times even two other running backs to create a three-headed monster, so to speak.”
That three-headed monster took to the field in earnest following the Lions’ third defeat of the season and first divisional loss at the hands of rivals Western Brown, 24-21.
The watershed moment of the new-fangled offensive attack came in the waning moments of the Lions week eight game against Goshen. Trailing the Warriors 21-7 with less than three minutes remaining, Anderson, with an assist from the Lions’ defense, turned a 14-point deficit into a seven-point lead in the span of two minutes.
“(The comeback) was a special thing to be apart of,” Stratton said. “Everybody wants to talk about all the points that Tyler scored, but if our defense doesn’t get the ball back, (Anderson) doesn’t get the chance to do that.”
Following that Oct. 17 win over the Warriors, the Lions looked to be riding out the season in style, blitzkrieging CNE with a senior night on the horizon in which they could play the role of spoilers. Instead, Norwood opened the door for the Lions to claim a piece of the conference title on Oct. 31.
A new-found motivation to go along with a desire to send the seniors out in style, New Richmond is hoping to use their numbers —36 letter earners, by Stratton’s count — to run their special brand of hurry-up offense with an array of weapons in the backfield.
“We’re going to try to use multiple formations to get to where we have an advantage,” Stratton said. “We’re going to play fast. Zero of our guys play both ways, but they have four or five who do, so we’ll try to gain an advantage trying to wear those guys down a bit. The way we package what we’re doing now enables us to play a little faster than we normally do.”
New Richmond will find out if their new-found motivation running a new-look offense and using new packages and formations will be enough to scare Norwood into sharing a piece of the SBC title at 7 p.m. on Halloween night.