Legendary coach Weston Schartz’s start at Kapaun has been stunning ... but not to him
.JPG "Kapaun Mt. Carmel football coach Weston Schartz")
In the first quarter, Kapaun didn’t allow a first down and scored on every drive.
The Crusaders beat Emporia 56-13 on Thursday. They went 18 minutes of football without letting Emporia gain 10 yards and pitched a 49-point shutout by halftime.
Weston Schartz is in his third game at Kapaun and he has already equaled last year’s win total. When he was hired at Kapaun, he said it was like getting hired as the coach at the University of Michigan.
“It has lived up to everything and more,” Schartz said. “It’s everything a coach would want.”
Emporia is set for a tough season. The Spartans lost a lot of seniors from 2019 and got thumped by 40 in their season-opener against a Class 3A opponent. But there is plenty of other evidence to prove Schartz’s turnaround at Kapaun, even putting Thursday aside.
In Week 1, Kapaun drove almost three hours west to Dodge City where the Red Demons were coming off their best season since 2010. Kapaun won 42-0 and had the backups in by halftime.
In Week 2, the Crusaders went to the west side of Wichita to face Bishop Carroll. Kapaun hadn’t beaten its Holy War rival since 1999. Schartz was in his 13th season of his first stint at West. Kapaun played Carroll to its closest game since 2009 when the teams were featured on ESPNU and Blake Bell was the Carroll quarterback.
Kapaun was 15 yards from beating Carroll before senior quarterback Andrew Gimino fumbled and Carroll recovered and killed off the rest of the clock.
Gimino said he was looking forward to that game his whole life, and it was hard to swallow how close the end of the losing streak was. But he said in conversations with Schartz and the other coaches, realized the season isn’t over.
“Coach is really hard on us, and that’s good,” he said. “We need someone to push us. We have a really good group of seniors, so we decided to just go all in from the start, and it’s really paying off.”
Schartz took over for Dan Adelhardt who Kapaun let go after a 2-7 season in 2019. Adelhardt was hired at Garden Plain and has already seen greener grass as his Owls are off to a 2-0 start.
When Schartz took over, he said he just tried to get the players to buy into what he was preaching. He knew he had the athletes to win games, he said, but he needed their commitment, and he has earned it, Gimino said.
The Crusaders’ early season success has come as a surprise to some across the Wichita area following a rough 2019. Schartz said what his team is accomplishing was never in doubt.
“I’m not surprised at all,” he said. “Their defense was pretty good all year last year; they just couldn’t move the ball much. But it’s Kapaun. I’m surprised we didn’t beat Carroll.”
Schartz came to Kapaun with 37 years of City League experience at West and Northwest and 195 wins, the second most in league history. When he was hired, he told The Eagle it would be his final job before retirement.
He said he has loved every ounce of the job so far.
“They have given a coach everything he needs to succeed,” Schartz said.
The rest of Kapaun’s schedule is lenient to say the least. The Crusaders face Great Bend next week. The Panthers lost to Maize South by 56 in their season-opener. Hays is Kapaun’s best remaining opponent, and the Indians went 4-6 last season.
Schartz said it might be easy for some teams to look past some of the games on the remainder of the schedule, but not at Kapaun in 2020.
“I tell them, ‘Every week is Carroll week,’ ” he said. “When you’re 2-7 the year before, you better not overlook anybody. People say that might but wrong, but reminding them that they went 2-7 last year, it works for me, and it works for them.
“They don’t want to be 2-7. It was embarrassing for them.”
This story was originally published September 17, 2020 at 9:55 PM.