Eight-man football team is rejuvenating this shrinking Kansas town

Thursday morning, principal Darryl Honas stepped inside a gym and grabbed the microphone.

“I can feel a different vibe,” he said.

Honas has been in Medicine Lodge for 30 years. He has seen the city at its peak — a student shy from Class 4A football in 1997 — to where it is now, fighting to stay above 2,000 people in town with a football team pushed into 8-man Kansas high school football because of it.

This is the first year Medicine Lodge has ever played 8-man football, and at a time the town could use a burst of energy, the Indians have delivered.

As recently as 2011, Medicine Lodge was in Class 3A. Since then, the Indians have won 14 games in six years.

Heading into Thursday night’s game against South Central High, Medicine Lodge was 3-1 with a chance to match its win total from the 2017 season with four games to play.

“I’ve had several people that have reached out to me who played here years and years ago that are really excited about this team,” Honas said. “Our kids feel like — no matter who it is — that they always have a chance.

“I just feel a difference in our kids and our community.”

Medicine Lodge is a city built on farming, oil and grit. The football team works out in a portable building. Many farms have merged, forcing many of the small family-run farms out of town. And the oil and gas industry is down.

That means there isn’t a lot of money to be made within the city limits right now, Honas said.

Leaving town is the only option to make a living for many citizens, including for senior quarterback Garrett Burden’s father, who works 45 minutes south in Oklahoma. Others aren’t as lucky.

“We have kids coming in nonstop saying, ‘Hey, do you have any food?’ ” Honas said. “We have kids that come to school without eating breakfast or the right shoes or clothes they need.

“A lot of families are struggling. They’ll get their water turned off or their electricity shut down. And we have to find a way to make it happen for them.”

Medicine Lodge also still remembers the 2016 fire that burned nearly 400,000 acres across Barber and Comanche counties. The fire caused Kansans more than $30 million in damages and is known as one of the largest fires in state history.

The residents of Medicine Lodge have been through a lot, even in the past half decade, but they wear their struggle with honor.

They are chiseled and tan without the patina of city glamor. They are burly and tested. But they all have a winning attitude. They all say hello as they walk by and are happy to shoot a smile for free.

Similarly, the Indians have had to fight for years but were happy to do it.

Medicine Lodge has long played in the Central Plains League. The CPL is one of the toughest small-class leagues in Kansas, with Conway Springs, Garden Plain, Cheney and Chaparral. The Indians haven’t finished higher than sixth since 2010.

That took a toll, but senior receiver Dakota Bayliff said it was welcome.

“You always want to play the best, but we were just ready to compete really,” he said.

Although the spirit was there, the results were not. The move out of the CPL and into independent 8-man football was an exciting proposition.

They weren’t going to quit, but the numbers got too small with enrollment dipping to 94. Medicine Lodge is tied for the third-biggest 8-man school in Kansas but is still often outnumbered on the sideline.

In the CPL, Burden said he would look across the field at the other teams’ sideline and look at 60 players and know that his team was outnumbered at least 2 to 1.

“It definitely is a little intimidating,” Burden said. “But our coaches would always say, ‘There’s only 11 out there on the field at one time. They can’t put all 60 out there against our 25.’“

But the change wasn’t easy. Numbers helped, but the players and coaches still had to learn schemes and how to play with three fewer kids on the field. Coach Josh Ybarra said the transition has been fun.

“When I was at Udall, their community really fought the transition because they had quite a bit of success as an 11-man town,” Ybarra said. “But here it wasn’t that way. The community was really ready for it.

“I remember when we found out we were going 8-man and I saw our district and first three games, I thought, ‘This could be rough.’ So it’s been very refreshing to see the kids really focus in.”

The success has come at the right time in city history, too.

Every three years, Medicine Lodge hosts the Peace Treaty Festival. It is a weekend-long event that shuts down the city. They have a powwow, pageant and re-enactment of the peace treaty that was signed in 1867 between the U.S. government and Southern Native American tribes.

It started Friday. Downtown streets are closed.

Medicine Lodge won’t be 8-man for long. Schools with fewer than 100 students simply have a choice whether to do it, and Ybarra said when they eclipse that mark again, they will go back into 1A or 2A.

The days of 3A football are likely done for the tiny city an hour and a half southwest of Wichita. But that’s OK. The Indians seem to have found their niche, and will continue to bring a fighting spirit in whichever class they are in.

But for now, Medicine Lodge is soaking it up.

The Indians have never won a state championship, and though it’s early, the genuine belief is there, even after Thursday’s 59-14 loss to South Central. And that is something that hasn’t been around in decades.

“We kind of figured we would do pretty good, but we really didn’t think that we’d be this good,” Burden said. “We did have dreams to make it to the playoffs and beat district teams, but now the reality is that we can get there, and we should.”

This story was originally published September 27, 2018 at 10:26 PM.