Kansas’ top high school football team is traveling out of state for its 2020 opener
Derby football has broken barriers on the field. This fall, the Panthers will physically break past the Kansas border.
Derby has scheduled a home-and-home series with the Newcastle Racers, one of the up-and-coming high school football teams in Oklahoma just southwest of Oklahoma City. The Panthers will become one of the only Wichita-area high school teams across all sports to compete outside of Kansas. They’ll be the only football team to do so.
They will travel to Newcastle this season, and the Racers will come to Derby in 2021.
“You get pretty comfortable playing the same teams that have the same coach year in and year out,” Derby coach Brandon Clark said. “This is going to be a fresh game plan, and that will be fun for our coaches, fun for our players.”
Derby is coming off back-to-back undefeated state championship seasons in Class 6A. In the 2019 title game, Derby beat Olathe North 63-26, breaking the state record for points. Clark said he has wanted to play out-of-state games for the past four seasons, but scheduling has been a challenge because different states start their schedules in different weeks.
Newcastle was the perfect fit in a couple of ways, he said.
Clark first met Newcastle coach Jeff Brickman almost a decade ago. They have run into each other since then at coaching clinics and team camps, and Brickman said they still talk about once a month — sometimes about football, sometimes not.
Greg Peterson, who was Clark’s receivers coach at Kansas State, is one of their mutual friends.
“It’s a unique experience that our players can be a part of,” Brickman said. “I thought it would be a win-win on both accounts.”
The agreement made sense from a football standpoint, too. Derby won its games by an average of 42 points last season. In 2018, the Panthers won by 36.5 a night.
Derby has played Garden City and Bishop Carroll in its non-AVCTL I league games over the past two seasons. Carroll, one of the top programs in the Wichita area, has put up a decent fight, but Garden City has lost its two games against Derby by 43 and 29 points. The starters were out by the fourth quarter.
In just four seasons, Brickman has turned Newcastle into one of the top spread-offense teams in the state. The Racers were set to make a playoff run last fall, having beaten two top-five teams in their Oklahoma classification, but their quarterback, Andrew Shumard, got injured. He will be back this fall.
If Newcastle and Derby played 10 times, Brickman said, the Panthers might win nine. But those are likely still better odds than most Class 6A Kansas teams would have against the Panthers, and Brickman, who previously coached Division II college football, said he relishes playing the toughest schedule he can assemble.
“This will probably be the best team I’ve had here,” Brickman said of his Racers.
Playing this particular game outside of Kansas made sense for Derby from a geographic standpoint. The Panthers would’ve faced a three-hour, 45-minute bus ride to Garden City in Week 1, so Derby will save more than an hour in driving to Newcastle, Okla.
Derby fans traveled well to Garden City last season, and Clark said he hopes a cross-border game won’t change the type of crowd they bring.
“Our community is already talking about it,” Clark said. “It’s kind of doing what we were hoping it would do: get people excited about football again. I hope our fanbase is excited to go out and make it a weekend around Oklahoma City.”
Scheduling Bishop Carroll was big for Derby. Clark said the rivalry with one of his coaching friends, Dusty Trail, has been exciting, and he is hoping to find more of the same with Brickman’s team south of the border.
“If his program is a direct reflection of him, it’s going to be a fun game,” Clark said.