Andrean trying to get out of regional rut

Updated: October 20, 2011 9:36PM

MERRILLVILLE — The 59ers were nervous. Fidgety. Tight. Quiet.

The regional — where Andrean seasons go to die — was minutes away, and the locker room was silent. Tense. Uncomfortable.

“Obviously, we haven’t had too much luck in regionals,” says Mason Zurek.

Zurek is as eloquent and insightful as his 4.3 GPA suggests, but he isn’t a vocal sort, not a rah-rah guy. But Andrean coach Phil Mason needed to do something, so he asked the then-junior standout to say something to his teammates. Anything.

“I just told everybody to calm down,” Zurek recalls. “It’s just a football game; there’s just a special title attached to it. It’s still going out there for 48 minutes, trying to defeat your opponent. It’s the same as any game.”

And it ended the same as every other regional has for Andrean over the last four seasons. With heartbreak. Agony. Despair.

Take a trip through the archives and wade through the adjectives thrown about after Andrean’s four straight regional losses.

Last year, when the 59ers squandered a 21-7 lead and lost 28-21 to South Bend St. Joseph’s after quarterback Demetri Blanco suffered a concussion, they were “beside themselves with grief.”

In 2009, when they lost 10-7 to Jimtown on a last-second field goal, it was described as “pain.” As “suffering.”

In 2008, when they came so close to knocking off heavily favored NorthWood, but fell 35-28 in a game that came down to the last minute, it was “tough.”

And in 2007, when a disputed fumble recovery cost them in a closer-than-it-looked 35-21 loss to St. Joseph’s, one player described it as “so bad.”

“It’s a mental block,” Zurek says. “The regional right now is a mental block for us. But I don’t think we’ll have that this year. The mentality is different.”

Indeed, past isn’t prologue. The 59ers know that. What happened the last four Novembers won’t have any real effect on what happens this November.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not in their heads. Like it was last year.

Only this time, the 59ers — the unbeaten 59ers, the Northwest Crossroads Conference champion 59ers, the now-Class 2A megapower 59ers — think all that agony will be what spurs them to ecstasy.

“Every year we’ve been in the program, we’ve lost in the regional,” says senior Brandon Pavlina. “That motivates us as seniors. This is our last chance to make it happen.”

Great expectations

It’s different here. Like it has been at Griffith. Like it has been at Lowell. Success isn’t measured at Andrean by wins and losses, but by trophies. So while you’ll hear plenty of standard “one game at a time” tropes around the Andrean weight room, you’ll also hear players and coaches freely talking about Bremen in the regional. About Bishop Luers in the semistate. About Evansville Mater Dei in a potential state title game.

Heck, Zurek has spent time online reading the Fort Wayne papers and watching film of Bishop Luers — the two-time defending state champion and the inevitable opponent people have been buzzing about since Andrean dropped down to 2A in the latest IHSAA realignment — on YouTube. Many other players at least check Luers’ scores every week.

Yes, they’re looking ahead.

That’s not taboo here.

“Sectionals have always been kind of different for Andrean,” Zurek says. “Our focus is always on state and what it takes to get there. So it’s always practice for the team you’re playing, but prepare for the team you will face if everything goes right. We know we can handle business in sectionals. We don’t know how good Bremen is, but that’s who we’ll probably play in the regionals. And everyone knows how good Luers is.”

All that matter-of-fact talk is not meant as a slap to Wheeler — tonight’s opponent and fellow unbeaten. Wheeler has a very impressive resume, having allowed a mere three touchdowns over the last seven weeks. But the strength of schedule doesn’t compare. Andrean has been beating up on 4A and 5A teams. Like Luers does. Like Mater Dei does.

In other words, there are 2A powers, and there are 2A megapowers. Andrean now finds itself among the latter.

“You have to look at some things on paper, and there’s quite a disparity there,” says Andrean coach Phil Mason, who has led the 59ers to the sectional title in each of his three seasons, only to fall in the regional. “Now that doesn’t take anything away from Dan (Klimczak) and the Wheeler program. I coached there in that program’s infancy and I have great respect for those kids, for that community, for that staff and for (athletic director) Randy Stelter. It’s a great program.”

The cold truth is the Class 3A sectional for Andrean the past four years has been pretty much a cakewalk. And you get the feeling the 59ers don’t expect this year to be much different.

At least, it better not be. Because this is Andrean. Things are different here.

“One of the things that’s been passed down from (former 59ers coach Brett St. Germain) to me, and I’m sure it was passed down to Brett, is that there is an aura about the second season here,” Mason says. “The switches turn on. And it’s pretty exciting around here. There are definitely expectations and there are plans put in place for you to keep playing. That’s from everybody, from the teachers to the maintenance workers — everybody’s talking to me about it. That’s great, that’s exciting.”

But?

“But it’s also a reality check that I have to take home with me every night,” Mason says. “To make sure the kids are ready to play and to make sure what happened the last four years doesn’t happen again.”

Lower class,
higher caliber

Mason had been dreading the reclassification. He saw the enrollment figures at Andrean. He knew the economy wasn’t getting better any time soon, and that the $7,000-a-year price tag to send a kid to Andrean was looking steeper and steeper to parents. He alluded to it a few times last year, how he wondered if the NCC would even want a 2A team in the league — even a Catholic school that’s obviously never had a hard time competing with bigger programs.

When the new classes came out, and Andrean was indeed placed in 2A, Mason and school officials briefly flirted with the idea of petitioning the IHSAA to stay in 3A. But the school administration quickly decided against tilting at that windmill.

“We weren’t going to battle the IHSAA by any means,” Mason says with a chuckle. “Sometimes we think they don’t like us anyway, so we weren’t going to add any fuel to that fire. The 2A thing is what it is.”

To the kids, it doesn’t matter much. After all, once you get past regionals — well, if you get past regionals — the elite teams in 2A are every bit as good as the elite in 3A, if not better. When it comes to private school powerhouses such as Chatard in 3A or Bishop Luers and Mater Dei in 2A or Lafayette Central Catholic in 1A, school enrollment doesn’t mean a heck of a lot. Andrean has proven that itself all year, from its win at 5A Merrillville in Week 2 to its trouncing of 4A Lowell last week.

So for the seniors who’ve endured such agony in the regionals, the accomplishment wouldn’t be diminished at all if the 59ers finally broke through this year.

“Would it cheapen it for me? No,” Zurek says. “Because 3A north obviously normally isn’t as strong as 2A north.”

As senior Kyle Lesch says: “At that point, you’re playing an elite team no matter what.”

If anything, the drop to 2A — and the snickers it elicited from Andrean’s legions of detractors — just motivated them even more. It allowed an utterly dominant team to somehow feel like a slighted underdog.

“I feel like every game, we’re coming out with a chip on our shoulders,” Lesch says. “Just to prove to the region that we may be 2A in football, but we know how to play here on Broadway.”

For Mason, though, it’s different. He clearly wanted to stay in 3A. And while he’ll be absolutely thrilled for his players if they break that regional drought and go all the way to state, his coaching career won’t be complete.

Not until he does it in 3A.

“Yeah,” he says after a momentary pause when the question is posed. “Yeah. I think I would need that. I do. I think I would need that.

“My only disappointment is the fact that at some point in my career, I hope I get to play someone from Sectional 18 again. That’s a coaching glitch for me. It’s something like a hump, a personal thing.”

For the players, though, the hump is a regional championship. Any regional championship. And should the 59ers get that far, they’ll undoubtedly be heavy favorites.

Of course, they’ve been heavy favorites before. You remember how that ended up — “grief,” “suffering,” “so bad.”

But this year, they swear it’s different. They insist there’s no “dark cloud” hovering over the program. With 20 seniors on the roster — including 10 defensive starters and the unstoppable Zurek in the backfield — the 59ers truly feel this is their time.

“We have such great senior leadership, the mindset has been different — everyone’s just been hungrier,” Pavlina says.

And the way the 59ers see it, the bitter taste of regionals past will make the breakthrough that much sweeter.

“Those losses have been a direct reason for the way we work this year,” Lesch says. “That’s part of our motivation. I couldn’t take another one like that.”

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