‘Nothing better in life’: Andale wins another Kansas high school football state title
The 6 a.m. weightlifting sessions in June were the toughest.
Summers for the Andale football team are always hard; that’s the cost of being a championship program. But this past summer? There was a different edge to it.
Andale was knocked off its throne last fall when Cheney ended the program’s 57-game winning streak and its string of state titles. After spending four straight years on top of the Kansas high school football world, Andale spent this past summer as the hunter.
“We obviously always work our butts off in the summer, but this time we had so much motivation,” Andale senior Landon Harp said. “We all had tears in our eyes last year walking off that field. But we knew next year was going to be different. We knew we didn’t want to feel that same feeling again. We knew this year was going to be different, we were going to get back to state and win it all.”
This season proved to be different by going back to the same result for Andale: a dominant season capped by yet another state championship.
Andale put the finishing touches on a 13-0 season on Saturday with a 36-19 win over Topeka Hayden in the Class 3A final played at Gowans Stadium in Hutchinson. It is the program’s fifth state championship in the last six seasons and eighth overall, as Andale improved to an astonishing 97-4 under head coach Dylan Schmidt.
What was the key to returning to the mountaintop? Leadership from a senior class who all had a nearly perfect attendance record for those early-morning weightlifting sessions this past summer.
“I think it was a cumulative effect of a lot of things and it starts with good parents and kids who buy into our system because of the success we’ve had,” Schmidt said. “We beat it into them that this is a team game and you’ve got to wait your turn and play your role and our kids have bought into that. I didn’t deal with one off-the-field issue with our seniors. Nobody complained about playing time, nobody complained about not getting the ball. We have seniors who probably could be starting at other places and they’re running scout-team offense for us and loving it. These kids are so selfless and it’s a credit to their parents for raising them right and it’s just made it such a joy to coach them.”
While the final margins showed another dominant run to a title — Andale outscored five postseason opponents 268-54 — Andale did face plenty of adversity in Saturday’s championship game.
Andale lost fumbles on back-to-back kick returns and Hayden capitalized to take a 19-12 lead into halftime. It was the first time in 87 games, since a loss to Bishop Miege in a 2017 title game, that Andale has trailed at the break and just the second time in Schmidt’s career.
But instead of being frazzled by the scoreboard, Andale’s players were more angry than anything. They couldn’t wait for the next two quarters to make up for their mistakes.
“We all had the same mindset that we were not going to lose that game,” Landon Harp said. “There was no panic. We knew we had great coaches and we were going to make the right adjustments. We just knew we were going to win that game.”
What has won Andale so many games under Schmidt is its depth and relentless attack. Teams may be able to slow down Andale’s offense for a quarter or two. Almost no one in the past eight years has been able to shut down Andale for an entire game.
That proved true once again on Saturday, as Andale methodically wore down Hayden. Landon Harp scored a 13-yard touchdown, then Jack Horsch punched in the two-point conversion for a 20-19 lead. After a Hayden fumble, Andale needed just three plays to tack on another eight points from a touchdown by Harp and two-pointer by Horsch. Horsch finished off the scoring in the fourth quarter with a touchdown run of his own, as Andale dominated the second half 24-0 to win.
In a three-headed attack, Sam Harp rushed for 163 yards and two scores, Landon Harp rushed for 148 yards and two scores and Horsch tacked on 98 yards and a score.
“We buy into the team system because we know how good we can be as a whole,” said senior Cooper Marx. “You can let one person shine individually, but if somebody takes that one person away, then it’s tough. It’s way harder to take a whole team’s ability away when everyone is working together. You can’t defend everyone.”
After pushing themselves so hard for the past year, the seniors reveled in their accomplishment of putting Andale back on top.
“There’s honestly no better feeling than making this memory playing football with my best friends,” Landon Harp said. “There’s nothing better in life than this.”
This story was originally published December 2, 2024 at 5:06 AM.
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