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Three Kansas City-area high school football teams — Lee’s Summit (Class 6), Platte County (Class 5) and Kearney (Class 4) — have an opportunity no local team has had in nearly four decades this weekend.
The Tigers, Pirates and Bulldogs won’t have to leave home — or at least northwest Missouri — for the chance to win a state championship.
No 11-man championship games have been played in the Kansas City region since Nov. 29, 1986, when Rockhurst beat Hazelwood Central 13-10 to win the Missouri 5A state title on a last-second field goal at Arrowhead Stadium.
“We had a beautiful, sunshiny day,” former Hawklets assistant coach Dennis Bullard, who coached defensive backs and special teams, recalled. “Perfect day for a football game.”
It ended perfectly, too, thanks to Dan Baker, who recovered a fumble in the end zone for Rockhurst’s only touchdown and put seven points on the scoreboard with his leg.
“He was the hero of the game,” Hawklets running back Merle Gardner said.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Brian Schorgl, a Rockhurst yell leader that season, said. “That was his day.”
After a Jason Tyrer sack denied Hazlewood a chance to take the lead in the fourth quarter — “I don’t remember a lot about that game, but I remember that,” Tyrer said with a laugh — Baker tucked a 40-yard field goal inside the left upright with 2 seconds left for game-winner, giving the Hawklets the first of back-to-back state championships.
“Not only is it a long field goal,” Alex Bresette, who was an athletic trainer for the team, said, “but the field-goal posts were narrower for the NFL than high school.”
George Pazell, a linebacker on that Rockhurst team who went on to play at Mizzou, was a lineman on the field-goal unit.
“All I remember is being in a pile after the field goal and listening to hear which sideline cheered,” he said to laughter from Bullard and six former Hawklets teammates who gathered Wednesday at O’Neill’s Restaurant & Bar, which Schorgl owns in Leawood.
Players from the Rockhurst team, mostly the members of the 1987 and 1988 graduating classes, remain close despite the unrelenting march of time.
“I think the wives are like, ‘Gosh, are they still talking about glory days?’” Pat Ryan, a linebacker on that title-winning team, said, “but we do still enjoy it.”
Bullard said the group is one of the most tightly bonded from his days as a coach and history teacher at Rockhurst.
“To this day, we all get together regularly,” Gardner said. “It’s truly like a brotherhood. I consider these guys brothers.”
Ryan said the state title serves as a sort of “that extra glue that keeps you coming back, smiles on our faces, and looking forward to things.”
“We were all hypercompetitive — and it’s easier to see now that we’re older,” Rob Haake, a wide receiver on those championship teams, said. “There’s a lot of people that I work with now, they think I’m crazy, but we just took it for granted.”
Ryan called it “a golden time” for the Hawklets, who also won a state basketball title that school year.
“I coached and taught for a dozen years and that is, without a doubt, those two years were the best group of — not just athletes, but guys,” Bullard said.
Still, 1986 was unique even amidst that golden era.
Rockhurst won the 1981 and 1983 state championships at Busch Stadium in St. Louis and repeated as state champs in 1987 at Mizzou’s Memorial Stadium, but the 1986 crown was the only one the Hawklets won on their home turf.
“We went into the playoffs kind of with the attitude that — we’re going to make it to Arrowhead Stadium,” Pazell said. “It’s our home. We'll have the home-field advantage if we do.”
Bresette said “probably 80%” of the estimated crowd of 10,000 fans that day were cheering for Rockhurst.
“At one point in the game, our crowd was so loud and yelling that their quarterback ... backs up, going, ‘I can't hear; I can't hear,’” he said.
Now, for the first time since Baker’s game-winner, the Missouri 11-man high school football championships return to the Kansas City area.
Platte County (13-0) puts its 27-game winning streak on the line against Carthage (12-1) at 7 p.m. on Friday night in search of a Class 5 repeat.
On Saturday, Kearney (13-0) plays Hannibal at 11 a.m. for the Class 4 crown, while Lee’s Summit (9-4) aims to stun unbeaten Nixa (13-0) for the Class 6 championship at 7 p.m.
“Getting the opportunity to play what’s essentially a home game in your backyard, I'm sure it carries a lot of weight for those guys,” Gardner said.
Members of the 1986 Rockhurst team would know.
“These are the best of times for them,” Ryan said. “Seize it while you can, because it doesn’t stay with you forever.”
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