Bob Lutz: CPL football teams stepping up to challenge Conway Springs, Garden Plain

Conway Springs and Garden Plain have played 350 football games since 2000 and won 301 of them. The Cardinals and Owls have made a mockery of the Central Plains League, winning every championship since 1997.

Check that. Cheney did share the title with Conway Springs in 1999 and Medicine Lodge tied with Garden Plain in 2006.

Otherwise, the only mystery about CPL football has been whether it was a Conway Springs or a Garden Plain year.

Suddenly, however, Garden Plain is coming back to the pack. The Owls were just 4-5 in 2013 and are 3-3 this season after Friday night’s win over Bluestem.

Chaparral beat Garden Plain for the first time in school history last week and the Roadrunners’ only loss was a 53-46 shootout against Trinity Academy.

Speaking of Trinity, the Knights had a chance to shock the CPL universe Friday night at Conway Springs against the undefeated Cardinals. But Trinity came up short 42-21 in a battle of unbeaten teams.

“The biggest football game Trinity has ever had,” Knights coach Jared McDaniel said hours before kickoff. “It seems like it was the biggest game last year, also.”

In 2013, Conway and Trinity were 4-0 when they met at Trinity. But an early injury to Knights’ standout running back Tyler Burns and a long delay because of bad weather took away some of the intrigue and Conway Springs won 34-14.

“We didn’t do too well,” McDaniel said.

Conway Springs is still the unquestioned leader of Central Plains League football, but other teams are gaining momentum. There’s Trinity and Chaparral, both with one loss. And Cheney is another one-loss team, though the Cardinals were drubbed by Trinity, 38-7.

“It’s real hard to move up in this league,” Chaparral coach Justin Burke, in his fifth season with the Roadrunners, said. “They do such a great job with their programs and they always have a bunch of kids who work hard and play hard.”

But Chaparral is an interesting team with an offense that should worry any team it plays.

Senior quarterback Shawn Nulik is approaching 1,000 yards both as a passer and rusher. He was a starting receiver as a sophomore, but an injury forced Chaparral to use a wildcat package last season and Nulik was the player taking the snaps.

“He’s just a winner,” Burke said.

The question for schools like Chaparral, Cheney, Trinity and the others in the CPL is whether coaches can build the kind of football programs that sustain success year after year like they’ve been able to do at Conway Springs and Garden Plain.

The Cardinals have won seven football state championships; Garden Plain has won one. The two teams are almost always in the mix.

“Even though Garden Plain might be down, they were still a tough game for us last week,” Chaparral’s Burke said.

McDaniel, who has done a fantastic job making football meaningful at Trinity, said there’s always a special feeling when he’s getting his team ready for Conway Springs or Garden Plain.

“We’ve played some games earlier this season against teams that maybe were down a little bit and going through some situations and there wasn’t that urgency,” McDaniel said. “But going into this week, our practices were totally different. We had that urgency, that hunger.”

Still, it’s daunting to play Conway Springs, especially at their place.

“Those kids out there for them, whether they have a lot of talent or not, the biggest thing is that it says ‘Cardinals’ on their jerseys,” McDaniel said. “Their players know their history and they hang on to that history very well.”

Conway Springs coach Matt Biehler said he knew the Central Plains League would be more difficult this season. He expected Trinity, Chaparral and Trinity to be better.

“There were a bunch of players in our league last year who were juniors and made the all-league team,” Biehler said. “We knew what was coming and we’re excited about it. It helps you prepare each and every week for tougher challenges. Our kids get fired up to play good teams. You can see it in practices all week, there’s just a little different atmosphere.”

Now let’s hope Douglass, Medicine Lodge, Belle Plaine, Independent and Bluestem can follow the leads of Chaparral, Cheney and Trinity and start to consistently challenge Conway Springs and Garden Plain.

“It seems like the league is changing this year a little bit,” Trinity’s McDaniel said. “On my my goals when I came here was to try and get us in that upper third of the league with Conway and Garden.”

Trinity has achieved that goal. Will others make a similar charge?

Burke said Chaparral’s JV team is 4-1 and said his eighth-grade class has a chance to be the best he’s ever coached. Those eighth graders recently beat Conway Springs, he said, 36-6.

“We see some teams coming up in our league,” Burke said. “This is kind of what we thought could happen. But you still see Conway up there, perched at the top.”

This story was originally published October 10, 2014 at 9:12 PM with the headline "Bob Lutz: CPL football teams stepping up to challenge Conway Springs, Garden Plain."