Lake Central back on track

Updated: September 8, 2011 9:57PM

ST. JOHN — Chase Fieldhouse never dreaded putting on his Lake Central football jersey on Friday mornings. He was never ashamed of it. No matter how many losses piled up, no matter how few people cared, Fieldhouse wore the Blue and White with pride.

“I’m proud to wear LC football equipment,” he said. “I always have been.”

Instead, what he dreaded was the funny looks. The snarky comments. The complete lack of recognition.

“People were like, ‘You play football?’” Fieldhouse said. “And that hurt. It hit deep, it really did.”

In the spring, Fieldhouse is the toast of Tri-Town, a first-team all-area center-fielder who was the region’s home run king this past season.

In the fall? He’s been just another nameless nobody on a football team the school and the three towns that funnel into it would rather have pretended didn’t exist.

No more.

“Last year, the football players didn’t have a lot of status in the school,” said second-year Indians coach Brett St. Germain. “Not that we do this for status, but I think if you watch our kids now, and the way they carry themselves, it’s different now. There’s some pride in being a football player here right now.”

Indeed, Lake Central — the proverbial sleeping giant — seems to have awoken, trouncing Portage 62-7 last week to move to 3-0. That’s the same Portage team that, while dealing with injuries last week, still hung tough with last year’s 5A No. 1 Mishawaka and Illinois power St. Rita in its first two games.

It was a historic beatdown. In the 31-year history of the Duneland Athletic Conference, only four teams have scored more points in a league game than Lake Central did last Friday night. Only two since the Indians joined the league in 2003.

And people across the region are noticing.

“Sixty-two points?” Crown Point coach Chip Pettit — the Bulldogs visit LC tonight — said moments after his team lost 21-20 to Merrillville last Friday. “Whoo. That’s a lot of points. That’s very impressive.”

People inside the Lake Central community are noticing, too. Fellow students offer congratulations in the classroom. Coaches from other sports give out kudos in the hallways. The stands are full, the crowd is loud — and a new phenomenon is happening at what seems like the Bizarro World Burial Grounds.

“People have always left early at our games,” Fieldhouse said. “Now they’re leaving early because we’re putting on too much of a beatdown.”

Yes, St. John, Dyer and Schererville — heck, all of Northwest Indiana — are changing their attitudes toward the Lake Central football program these days.

And it all started with a change of attitude within the program.

Taking accountability

Look in the mirror, Brett St. Germain told the huddled mass of kids in front of him in March of 2010. Look at yourselves.

Don’t look east to Andrean. Don’t look north to Mount Carmel. Don’t look around at a bleak stadium, at a cluttered practice field, at a cramped weight room.

One winning season in nine years? Two wins each the last two seasons? The embarrassment of being the sixth-largest school in the state, by far the biggest school in the region, yet one of the least successful?

Look at yourself. Blame yourself.

Nobody else.

“Instead of looking everywhere else for all the answers and only finding excuses, our kids needed to look in the mirror for those answers,” St. Germain said. “They were trying to find the answers for why we’re not winning in every place but the one they should be looking at — the mirror. We’ve got to get better at what we do, and we’ve got to find out what this means to all of us.”

The Indians weren’t buying it.

They still wanted to blame the private schools for stealing their best talent. Still wanted to lament their substandard — at least, by DAC standards — facilities. Still wanted to point a finger at a teammate before pointing a thumb at themselves.

And it showed. Offseason workouts were poorly attended. Weight-room improvement was marginal at best. And practices were lackluster affairs — players ambling off the field for water breaks rather than sprinting, taking off their helmets in between whistles, complaining and offering half-hearted efforts on a regular basis.

These were problems St. Germain never had at Andrean, where he took over a perennial state championship contender and turned it into a state championship winner in 2004.

At Lake Central, the task was much harder, the learning curve exponentially steeper.

“We were a bad practice team last year,” St. Germain said.

Senior Dylan Morang was more blunt.

“We were a bad team,” he clarified.

A second straight two-win campaign was the proof. The only victories came against East Chicago Central and Michigan City. It was yet another dismal year for a program that famously lost its first 21 DAC games and is 6-49 all-time in league play.

But things started to change — ever so slightly — as the season wore on. Much of the dead weight that was dragging down the program was eliminated from the roster. More of the players bought into St. Germain’s practice demands, and his expectations. Kids stopped blaming each other on botched drills and bad plays, and started taking accountability themselves.

And a funny thing happened — Lake Central got better. In the last game of the regular season, the Indians gave eventual regional champion Valparaiso all it could handle in a 21-14 loss. The following week, Lake Central challenged Munster to the end in a 21-14 sectional defeat.

After a week off, the Indians were right back in the weight room — now armed with some evidence that this St. Germain guy might actually know what he’s talking about.

“People realized that we do have potential, that we are a good team, that we do have the people to put together a run,” Morang said. “We hung with a semistate team, and that motivated a lot of guys.”

St. Germain — now with his first complete offseason as the Indians’ coach ahead of him — noticed the attitude change amost immediately.

“There was no doubt that helped,” St. Germain said of the late-season improvement. “We saw good things in the weight room over the offseason; we saw the growth in numbers we wanted to see. And then, going into the summer, we said that was Phase I, your commitment to the weight room. Now it’s about improving your preparation, your willingness to watch film at home, to stay after practice. And they did. All of that stuff was non-existent last year. Making our kids stay and watch film after practice, to them it was torture. They just didn’t understand that that’s what you need to do be competitive. That’s all part of the process.”

A work in progress

You hear the phrase “the process” a lot around the Lake Central program. The steps are as obvious as they are critical.

First, LC had to become competitive. That happened at the end of last season.

Next, LC had to buy into St. Germain’s demanding year-round program. That happened over the winter and summer.

Next, LC had to find its identity. That happened right out of the gate this year, as the Indians established themselves as a physically punishing running team. Through three games, they’ve racked up 955 yards on the ground, led by quarterback David Yancey (336 yards, four touchdowns), Fieldhouse (237 yards, four TDs) and Riley Arvantis (196 yards, three TDs).

Next, LC had to learn to close out games. As Fieldhouse puts it, “We didn’t know how to win.” That happened in Week 1, when LC jumped out to a 14-point halftime lead, only to watch Munster rally to force overtime. But rather than fold like LC teams of old might have, the Indians proved resilient, and won the game on Drew Hollingsworth’s 10-yard run on the first play of overtime.

The next step in the process?

Playing — and succeeding — with expectations.

Tonight’s clash with Crown Point might be the biggest regular-season Duneland Conference game the Indians have had. It’s a chance to play an elite opponent and prove they’re for real to a skeptical region and a success-starved community. It’s a chance to establish themselves as legitimate DAC contenders — something they’ve never been.

It’s been more than a decade since Lake Central players have faced these kinds of expectations. How they handle that burden could determine how dramatic this turnaround season becomes.

After all, Lake Central players have gotten used to trying to put huge losses in the rear-view mirror. How will they handle trying to move past one of the most lopsided victories in league history?

“If you want to call something the X-factor, I guess that’s it,” St. Germain said. “We’ll have to see come Friday. We feel confident in our kids that they’re listening to the messages we’re giving them. That’s been kind of the theme everywhere I’ve been — you have to have a short memory, regardless of the result. We won’t ultimately know if they can do that until Friday. But I feel pretty good with where our kids are at mentally, and what they want to accomplish this year.”

As St. Germain was talking, the practice field he was on was cramped and cluttered. The junior varsity team was running drills on the outfield of the JV baseball field. The marching band was practicing walking backwards on a thin strip of grass between the practice field and the parking lot.

And some of the finest football players in St. John, Dyer and Schererville were somewhere else, wearing Andrean helmets or Mount Carmel jerseys.

Not too long ago, you would have heard a lot about all that from the boys in blue.

No more.

wThat’s the message St. Germain wants his players to receive when they look themselves in the mirror. That’s the attitude change he’s seeking. That’s the “winning culture” he’s trying to create.

And while it’s still early, it appears that’s what’s finally happening at Lake Central.

“I have some friends that go to Andrean and Mount Carmel,” Morang said. “They want to come back here. They wish they stayed. And attitude has a lot to do with it. We’re winning — and we’re expecting to win.

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