Edinburgh football fighting uphill battle

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series examining the state of high school football in Johnson County.

Jason Burton lived through perhaps the lowest point in Edinburgh’s football history. He’s not going to be scared off too easily.

Burton, who graduated from the high school in 2011, was a junior when the Lancers defeated Indiana School for the Deaf on Oct. 2, 2009 to snap a 52-game losing streak — the second-longest drought in state history.

“I’ve been on some of the teams here that we had 15 kids, so I’ve seen it the worst it can get to,” he said.

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Unfortunately for the Lancers, it’s seldom gotten too much better.

Since its inception in 1951, the program has managed just seven winning seasons and two other .500 finishes. In almost half of its 67 years of football, Edinburgh has finished with either one win (18 times) or none (14 times).

Last fall, in Burton’s first season as the head coach at his alma mater, Edinburgh finished 1-9, with the lone victory a forfeit win over Class A state runner-up Eastern Greene.

The on-field score in that one was 61-16. Overall, the Lancers were outscored by a margin of 502 to 126 and finished the season ranked 323rd among 327 Indiana teams in the Sagarin computer rankings.

With sustaining team members almost as formidable a challenge as winning games — Edinburgh suited up 17 players in a loss to Milan — some might begin to wonder whether it’s all worth it.

For those who call the town home, it clearly is.

“I know Edinburgh hasn’t had much success here in football, but it’s still a community event,” said athletic director David Walden, who graduated in 1979. “We still get good crowds. We still get people to come out.”

“I don’t foresee anyone letting it die completely,” Burton added.

The two big struggles for any small-school football program are getting enough players to come out and having enough money to keep paying the bills. On both counts, the Lancers are getting by.

Not including the concession stand income, which supports the athletic department as a whole, Edinburgh took in $11,015 last football season and had expenses totaling $16,504, including new 25-second clocks. The program typically ends up with an average shortfall of about $4,000 a year, which concession profits generally make up for.

“We’re not like the big schools,” Walden said. “If Whiteland hosts Center Grove, they can get a gate of about $20,000. My biggest gate last year was, I think, Brown County, and it was like $2,700. And to me, I get excited about that.”

Finding players has been the more challenging piece of the equation. With fewer than 300 high school students, Edinburgh struggles to get more than 30 to come out for the team each season.

Burton sets a goal of getting seven or eight players in each class to play, which would keep him treading water in the high 20s or low 30s. That’s roughly on par with what most Class A programs live with.

“Even with it being a small school, we still have the issue of specialization,” Burton said, “so our big issue this first 18 months or so that I’ve been the head coach has been just trying to get some of these better athletes in the school to dual-sport. I know we’re a basketball town, just based off of history, but we still struggle with getting those types of kids out.”

“It hurts when you lose kids because they don’t want to get hurt and things like that,” Walden added. “Because we’ve got some kids walking in this building that should be playing football that don’t.”

Even if Burton is getting a few of those players, a 30-player roster doesn’t leave much margin for error once the season starts and injuries begin to take a toll.

“If our numbers are around 24 to 30, then when we get injured, kids get hurt, then that really hurts us,” Walden said, “because we’ve got kids going both ways, and you start getting to kids that physically aren’t ready to play at this level.”

But when the team is reasonably healthy, a roster of that size is manageable. The only situation in which either Burton or Walden could imagine no longer being able to support football in Edinburgh is if the participation numbers drop off — a trend that Burton has started to see hints of at the fifth- and sixth-grade level.

“Not significant,” he said of the dip, “but a few kids here and there don’t really help in our situation.”

Again, though, Burton has seen rock bottom, and so he remains confident that the Lancers can stay afloat for the foreseeable future. He can, however, see a timeline where that might not happen.

“Now if we got down to 15 kids on a high school team, then that may be an administrative thing where they say, ‘Hey, is this sustainable?’ — as far as expenses, too,” Burton said. “So I’d say if we got down in the low teens it would definitely be a discussion, but I can’t foresee the town, with the pride they have in our athletics here, letting it die completely off.”

That pride is very much evident in Walden, who embodies the never-say-die spirit of the plucky underdog community.

He, too, says that dipping into the low teens might mark the breaking point, but he has faith that it won’t get that bad.

“My last year I coached freshman football at Greenwood, we had 13 kids, and that’s tough. It’s tough to play with those numbers,” he said. “(But) it doesn’t enter my mind, because I always think we would be able to beat the bushes enough to get kids out.”

Despite not having any real tradition of success to build on — Edinburgh has never won a sectional title and hasn’t finished above .500 since 1993 — it doesn’t appear that beating bushes is even going to be a necessity this year.

“Ironically, coming off of a very poor season, where we were trying to rebuild what little we had, there’s actually a lot of excitement around football right now,” Burton said. “We have some kids coming out that hadn’t in the past; we have kids that are becoming football-first kids, which hasn’t been a thing here. So right now, I feel like it’s in a pretty good place.”

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Hard times

Edinburgh’s last winning football season came 25 years ago, when the 1993 team went 7-2. A look at how the Lancers have fared since:

Year;Record

1994;3-5

1995;4-5

1996;3-5

1997;0-10

1998;1-9

1999;0-10

2000;0-10

2001;2-9

2002;1-9

2003;0-10

2004;1-9

2005;0-10

2006;0-10

2007;0-10

2008;0-10

2009;1-9

2010;1-9

2011;3-8

2012;4-6

2013;5-6

2014;3-7

2015;2-8

2016;3-7

2017;1-9

Total;38-200

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