I thought Lane would enjoy reading this when he gets old enough. Brought back a lot of memories!
This was published in the News Tribune on 9/29/09
There are always two sides to a high school strike. There is the teacher’s union, fighting for the rights and the needs of its own, and there is the school board with its members trying to make a working budget while also creating a healthy work environment. There are demands. There are concessions. There are sacrifices on both sides. Sometimes it can get pretty ugly. Lost in all the numbers crunching and heated discussions is the third, and possibly overlooked, side of a strike.
The kids. The athletes. The seniors who are going to graduate from high school next spring and remember the glory days on the field. It’s hard to remember something that never happened. On Wednesday morning, Ottawa High School could possibly be going on strike, and from all reports and from anyone who knows anyone involved, it is going to happen. It shouldn’t. It’s easy for me to say that, right? I am not involved. But today I am going to play a third-party vendor in this case.
I want to sell the story of that forgotten third side. Back in 1998, La Salle-Peru had what was expected to be a pretty darn good football team. The Cavaliers had everything, speed in senior Matt McConville, an elusive quarterback with a rocket arm in Scott Mertes, a vicious defensive leader in Jim Chamberlain and hard-nosed, I-don’t-want-to-mess-with-them offensive and defensive talent in Dusty and Dallas Freeman.
Twenty-one of the 22 starters were seniors. La Salle-Peru head football coach Barry Reade had himself something pretty special, and L-P showed it in its first game of the season against Limestone. McConville ran for 129 yards and two touchdowns, Dusty Freeman caught a pair of scores and Mertes ran for three more touchdowns in a 55-0 rout. “It was a very good team,” said La Salle-Peru athletic director Greg Sarver, who was a defensive coordinator on the 1998 Cavaliers. “We had kids who paid the price for four years of their high school career and, basically, something was taken away from them, which is too bad because that was a very, very good football team.”
What was taken from the ‘98 boys was the most important part of their season — the playoffs.
The Tuesday night after L-P’s opening win over Limestone, talks about a salary increase between the L-P school board and the teacher’s union broke down.
The L-P teachers voted 68-21 to strike, and by Wednesday morning, the halls of L-P were empty. That Friday night, L-P lost to Peoria Central, 2-0. The final result was not decided on the football field. L-P was forced to forfeit the game to a Peoria Central team that would go on to finish 2-7 on the season with one win coming over L-P via the forfeit. That win proved costly. “The hardest thing to do is look a kid in the eye who put everything on the line to basically go far in the playoffs and then all of a sudden, we’re not even in,” Sarver said. “For people to say, ‘You might not have won that game anyhow’ is probably foolish. We would have won that game.”
There’s no doubt about that. L-P would have dominated that night. McConville, the NewsTribune Offensive Player of the Year in 1998, would have had another big night in a 1,000-yard season that only included eight games. Instead, nothing.
A game that never happened. The Cavaliers went on to finish 6-3 that season, only losing 7-6 in a thriller against Ottawa and 9-0 in a rain-soaked, oddly-officiated game against Geneseo. Back then, a 6-3 record is the new 5-4, and L-P found itself on the wrong side of the playoff points system. There would be no postseason in 1998.
A 7-2 record would have clinched the Cavaliers a chance for memories that would have been packed away in the back of the mind for a story over a beer 20 years down the road. “We never thought we wouldn’t get in,” Sarver said. “I’ll be honest, we thought we would be fine. That last week of the season, some teams won that really surprised and shocked people, and that’s basically what happened. We were on the outside looking in.”
Ottawa may be, too, if it strikes. A forfeit loss to L-P on Friday night puts Ottawa’s record at 3-3, and, according to the IHSA strike policy, if the strike is not settled by next Wednesday, the Pirates’ home game on Oct. 9 against Morris will be a second forfeit. That’s a possible 3-4 record heading into a Week 8 game against Geneseo, you know, the traditional NCIC Reagan powerhouse Geneseo. That’s trouble. Learn from the ghosts of strikes past, talk to a 1998 L-P player or coach and then think about the third side of this story and give them a chance. Give them something to remember.
Jim Cogdal is the NewsTribune Sports Editor. He can be reached at 223-3200, ext. 139or at sports@newstrib.com.
I remember where I was when we found out that LP did not make the playoffs...the Halloween Dance...the guys were really upset...seemed really big at the time, and to a 17-year old high school senior, it was.
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