By Roger Grossman
News Now Warsaw
With the Warsaw football team immersed in a historic run in the football playoffs, some historical perspective on how we got here is necessary.
Gather around, friends, and let me tell you a couple of stories.
Let’s go back to the winter of 1995. Ted Huber stepped down as Warsaw football coach and the search began for the next one.
The guy who emerged as the top candidate was Churubusco coach Phil Jensen.
The Penn High School and Butler University tight end was hired, and no one realized that Warsaw football, and the community as a whole, was about to change forever.
Jensen brought his style of toughness and precision to Warsaw, but the start of his tenure was rough to say the least. In the fall of 1996, Warsaw’s first game under Jensen was a home loss to Tippecanoe Valley 12-0.
During that game, legendary Times Union photographer Gary Nieter took a photo of the new coach expressing disappointment in the quality of play of one of his team members in a very loud way.
The community reacted how you’d expect them to.
The next two games — road games — also ended in shutout losses.
The season ended with a record of 2-7.
People were upset.
The WCHS administration showed patience, Jensen stayed the course, and three years later Warsaw was 8-2 and Tiger football had tongues wagging.
Jensen, over two stints as the Tiger head coach, won more games than anyone else in school history.
He knew when he started that the biggest challenge he faced was intangible, but powerful nonetheless. His task was to overcome the concept, real or perceived, that Warsaw was “just a basketball school.”
My memory of that was a home playoff game against a favored Northrop team. Warsaw competed well but came up short.
I was on the field at what is now Lakeview Middle School to watch that night.
Phil and I were at Butler together, and he was and is a friend.
I grabbed him as he walked by and said something he found odd. I said “Congratulations.”
He responded with “For what?”
I grabbed his arm, swung him around, and pointed to the home stands, which were filled with Tiger fans from end to end and top to bottom.
I said to him, “Look at this! Look at all these people who are here to watch this game! YOU did that Phil, this is because of you!”
He had accomplished an unspoken mission. He had made Friday nights in August, September, and October matter to the people of the Warsaw School District.
The second big day was in the winter of 2018, a month after Jensen had retired from coaching the Tigers.
A phone call was made by then-Warsaw High School teacher and offensive line coach Michael Curtis to his dad, Bart, the coach at Mishawaka and a member of the Indiana Football Hall of Fame.
In February, the elder Curtis came to Warsaw and brought his “Flexbone” offense with him.
Warsaw fans, who had seen their team run everything from the “run-and-shoot” with four and five wide receivers to a traditional two-back set with a tight end, were being asked to embrace an offense that often throws less than five passes in a game.
Fans were skeptical and assumed a boring brand of football was on their horizon. They could not have been more wrong.
It’s true that Warsaw doesn’t throw the ball more than five times a game. But unless you are the parent of a player hoping to get a college scholarship as a pass catcher, no one thinks what Warsaw does is boring.
Not anymore.
It’s about discipline and attention to detail. It’s about repetition and drilling. It’s about being willing to do what others won’t for the good of the collective group.
From Day One, anyone wanting to play football at Warsaw has been expected to adopt these concepts as a way of life. On the field. In the locker room. In the classroom. At home. In the community.
Everywhere.
And now, in his seventh season, Bart Curtis has joined Phil Jensen in doing what was unthinkable here. He’s turned Warsaw into a town that can love both basketball and football and proven that both can be good at the same time.
I do not believe that any of what’s happened here in the last three weeks or what will happen tomorrow at Lucas Oil Stadium would have been possible without the events of those two days, or without those two men.
