Chris Howell
The Lima News
It had been 264 days since the last high school football game of the 2023 season, but as of Thursday night, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming.
We waited eight months and 20 days to see teams back on the gridiron, and now we’re rewarded with games every week until the state championships take place in Canton on Dec. 5-7.
Although Week 1 is typically filled with a plethora of mismatches between nonconference opponents, a few games stood out, including Ada’s last-second win over Upper Scioto Valley and Defiance’s overtime loss to Napoleon.
Let’s take a look at some important numbers from the week that was.
1 — Shawnee’s 33-19 win over LCC was Shane Wireman’s first as the school’s head coach. Wireman was accustomed to winning at Waynesfield-Goshen, where he went 20-0 over the last two years with the Tigers in the regular season. Many people have wondered how that success would translate to his new home, but he’s already passed Shawnee’s 2023 win total, and we’re only at the start of Week 2. All kidding aside, here’s to many more victories for the Indians.
2 — Delphos Jefferson’s 33-0 win over North College Hill and Delphos St. John’s 54-27 victory over Lehman Catholic meant that both Delphos teams won on the same week for the first time since Oct. 28 of the 2022 season. Both teams entered the year with lofty goals, mentioning that it was their team’s missions to get back to the postseason. So far, so good.
6 — Both the Western Buckeye League and Northwest Conference won six games over the weekend. Elida, Celina, Van Wert, Wapakoneta, Bluffton, Crestview, Columbus Grove and Allen East won in convincing fashion, while teams like Bath, Defiance and Kenton lost by three points or less.
12 — Isaiah “Boog” Wilson had 12 carries for 81 yards in Lima Senior’s 35-20 win over Piqua. That’s not something I think many people expected based on the pass-heavy offense Bill Lawrence is known for, but sure enough, the Spartans ran the plays out of the wishbone, and it worked. Lawrence told me in his preseason interview that Lima Senior would be unpredictable, and that was certainly the case in Week 1.
55 — In Columbus Grove’s 35-7 victory over Pandora-Gilboa, Levi Schroeder intercepted a third-quarter pass from Rockets quarterback Cory Gerten and took it back 55 yards for a touchdown. Two years ago, Schroeder’s older brother, Landen, had a 55-yard pick-six in the Bulldogs’ first-round playoff win over Black River. Now both brothers are “in the book,” as Columbus Grove statistician Ned Stechschulte would say.
215 — Maria Stein and Linton Indiana are 215 miles apart. That’s roughly a three-and-a-half-hour trip in a car, and probably even longer in a bus. As predicted by anyone from the area, the defending state champion Flyers made the trip worth it with a 45-6 victory over the Miners. This week Marion Local travels 77 miles to Franklin High School. That bus ride should be about two hours shorter.
70 and 14 — Coldwater’s Cale Wenning and Edgerton’s Levi Hess, two young men who were much more than football players, both tragically passed away as a result of accidents last week. Many games in Mercer County honored Wenning, who wore No. 70 for the Cavaliers, by wearing orange on Friday night. At St. Henry-St. Marys, both student sections did a wonderful job of that. There are no words that make sense in times like this, but the way small towns band together and support each other is truly something special.
Reach Chris Howell at 567-242-0468 or on Twitter/X at @Lima_Howell
