It was a warm August night, and the highly vaunted South Warren High School football team was playing host to Hendersonville (Tenn.), a touted team in its own right based about an hour’s drive south from the Spartans’ home turf.
It was anybody’s game, most of the way, but Hendersonville’s second-half surge proved to be the Commandos’ time to shine.
Hendersonville left a shiner on South Warren’s left eye, to use boxing parlance, outscoring the Spartans 20-7 in the second half on its way to a 27-20 upset of Brandon Smith’s talented South squad. Hendersonville repeatedly gashed one of the Spartans’ greatest strengths, their inside run defense, late in the game and slipped out of town with the victory.
Three months and a little change later, Hendersonville has finished its season, with an impressive 10-4 record. Summit High School, out of Spring Hill, Tennessee, used a 13-point second quarter to whip the Commandos 28-7 over Thanksgiving weekend.
Hendersonville was out.
And just to the north of the Kentucky/Tennessee state line, the Spartans, already a tradition-rich program since the school opened in 2011, were arriving at the South Warren campus well past midnight, as South celebrated a rousing 46-25 victory over previously unbeaten Woodford County in Versailles, Kentucky.
It was 46-3 at the half, giving the Spartans the luxury of a running clock in the second half for the second straight week in the KHSAA Class 5A playoffs. One week earlier, South Warren eliminated visiting South Oldham, 47-13, in a game that was never close.
That’s where the Spartans find themselves, in the first weekend in December, playing for the school’s third KHSAA state championship in school history. No. 1-ranked South Warren (13-1) will square off with Lexington’s Frederick Douglass High School, another new kid on the block, in the KHSAA Class 5A title game at 4 p.m. EST Saturday at the University of Kentucky’s Kroger Field.
The Broncos, also sporting a 13-1 record, have had an impressive postseason run of their own. Frederick Douglass has yet to be challenged in the playoffs, dispatching, in order, Montgomery County, Scott County, Southwestern and Owensboro High School, by a massive combined total of 177-27.
Like South Warren, Frederick Douglas is wont to go for the jugular in the formative moments of the game, like the Spartans did in their manhandling of a stunned Woodford County squad, just about 10 miles or so west on U.S. 60 from Lexington.
“Yeah, they were a little stunned,” Smith said earlier this week. “The big thing, I thought, was our execution, and our preparation for the game. We had a great start and made the most of it.”
Yes, they did.
The Spartans are back in Lexington for the KHSAA’s championship weekend, which builds up until the largest two classifications duel in expansive Kroger Field. After South Warren’s showdown with Frederick Douglass, two Louisville heavyweights, St. Xavier and Male High School, will tangle in the KHSAA Class 6A championship game.
It’s rarified air, but the Spartans are certainly familiar with the atmosphere.
In 2018, with future Duke quarterback Gavin Spurrier at the helm, Smith’s South Warren squad turned back Covington Catholic in the KHSAA Class 5A title game at Kroger Field. Bowling Green eliminated their crosstown rival Spartans in each of the next two seasons, with the Purples bringing home the championship last year, but the bottom line is South Warren hasn’t been challenged in its 12 games since the loss to Hendersonville on August 27.
“It might have been the best thing that happened to us,” Smith said. “I’m not sure we’d be here if it wasn’t for that game.”
In particular, the second half.
Still, a few days later, third-quarter South Warren quarterback Caden Veltkamp quietly expressed confidence that the Spartans could get back to the championship game. Veltkamp was a gangly freshman, watching from the sideline, when South Warren stopped Covington Catholic 20-16 on that cold December day in Lexington.
On Saturday, it’ll be Veltkamp’s swan song before he moves on to play at his hometown school, Western Kentucky University. The 6-foot-5 South Warren quarterback has given his team leadership, smarts and a passing game seldom seen at the high school level. Plus, he’s completed 156 of 232 passes on the season, for 2,432 yards and 32 touchdowns.
He’s been intercepted only five times.
In the running game, the veteran offensive line anchored by South Warren seniors Zack Goodwin and Preston Parks has shown steady improvement over the course of the season. In the playoffs, they’ve been on top of their game. Veltkamp, as you might expect, can’t talk enough about his guys on the offensive line. As Seth Maxwell, played by the late, great Mac Davis told Phil Elliott/Nick Nolte in his “North Dallas Forty,” while receivers “put me in the sports pages but these guys (the offensive line) keep me outta the obituaries …”
It’s hyperbole, sure, but that’s the reality of football.
It’s a game of attrition, and over the course of a 14- or 15-game season, a football team comprised of adolescents is going to incur its share of injuries.
Parks, the 6-foot-5 senior right tackle, believes the Hendersonville game might have been a blessing in disguise, too. The Spartans went on to dominate their next 12 opponents, including crosstown rival Bowling Green, which had no answer for the aggressive South Warren front seven.
But it’s the Spartans’ offensive line that sets the tone, that gets South Warren moving forward, that is getting Veltkamp and Co. back in the championship weekend spotlight.
“We needed to be humbled again,” Parks said. “At the beginning of the year, I don’t think we thought we could be beaten. At the beginning of the year, you write down your goals. A state title is the first goal, obviously, but you’ve got to do a lot of things just to get a chance.”
Goodwin believes the Spartans may be peaking at the right time.
“Both sides of the ball are really hitting on all cylinders,” Goodwin said. “Our special-teams play has been very good. The Hendersonville game was a reality check. Everybody got focused again, after that game.
“When we went to Woodford County, it was dead quiet, on the bus, going up there. There was no joking around, very flittle conversation … We were ready to play. Coming home, (from Woodford County), yeah, it was fun.”
Frederick Douglass, however, certainly has the Spartans’ attention.
FDHS quarterback Samuel Cornett has completed 152 of 236 passes for 2,318 yards and 23 touchdowns. He’s been intercepted just four times. The Broncos share the wealth, at running back and wide receiver, but they’re loaded with Division I prospects, and they play in UK’s back yard.
So, in a sense, Frederick Douglass will have a home-town advantage. Brandon Smith again had his team practice this week on the artificial turf at Warren Central High School, the same surface the Spartans will toil on come Saturday afternoon.
South Warren defensive tackle Jake Jackson said the Broncos “probably have six or seven Division I (prospects) … They’ve got some crazy athletes.”
“They’re ultra-talented. They probably have the most individual talent we’ve seen in a long time,” Brandon Smith said. “I think our team has come a long way, with the mental aspect of the game, but this is the ultimate challenge.
“It ain’t over yet.”
Kickoff is scheduled for a 4 p.m. EST start, 3 p.m. in South Central Kentucky.
