Minster’s Brogan Stephey outruns the New Bremen defense for a 58 yard touchdown. (Press Pros Feature Photos By Lee Woolery)
Minster plays complementary football, wins the line of scrimmage on most plays and rolls behind another big night from quarterback Brogan Stephey.
New Bremen, OH – Will Frimel understands the importance of what guys like him do for winning teams in small-school football.
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He plays offense and defense in the trenches where brotherhood and great effort on every play are necessary to win. So he blocks. He disrupts. He tackles.
And so do a bunch of other guys wearing jersey numbers in the 50s and 60s for Minster. The Wildcats did it so well Friday night, especially in a dominating first quarter, that they left no doubt in a 48-14 victory over MAC rival New Bremen.
“If you win the line of scrimmage, you’re probably gonna win the game,” Frimel said, restating a universal football truth, not because he’s heard it a million times, but because he lives it every Friday night with rarely a play off.
“Coach told me this week that if you need a break, we’re gonna get you a break on offense,” he said. “We need you on defense.”
Minster’s up-front dominance on both sides of the football was obvious in person. And the final team numbers more than illustrate how the Wildcats (6-1, 4-1 MAC) won this game. Frimel, who plays tackle and creates bottlenecks that running backs get stuck in, and his frontline brethren held the Cardinals (4-3, 2-3) to 69 rushing yards. And a lot of those same players (including Frimel at right guard) blocked for 266 rushing yards and protected for 273 passing yards. That’s a total of 539 yards of offense.
Minster’s Connor Schmiesing with the catch. New Bremen’s Owen Rindler defends.
And those numbers prove a universal truth in the Midwest Athletic Conference.
“Anytime you can go on the road in the MAC and get a win by 30, you gotta be proud of it,” Minster head coach Seth Whiting said.
The 30-point tone was set in a blur. The Wildcats big-played their way to a 21-0 lead. And the defense, led by Frimel and the rest of the front four, built a brick wall. When the Cardinals tried to pull a blocker to help create a hole, Frimel got in the way. And everyone up front got their shots in on ballcarriers. The Cardinals had plenty of chances in the first quarter but were held to zero net yards.
“Their defense really doesn’t get enough credit,” New Bremen head coach Chris Schmidt said. “A lot of people see how explosive they are offensively, but they’re really good defensively, too. It does make it hard to move it consistently.”
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Whiting gave defensive coordinator Kyle Coleman and the rest of the defensive staff credit for getting their unit ready.
“He does an excellent job of setting up the game plan and breaking people down and getting tendencies and having his call sheet ready to roll,” Whiting said.
Minster’s Caleb Couse scores the first touchdown of the game on a swing pass from Brogan Stephy.
The other half of the equation – the offense led by quarterback Brogan Stephey – was the perfect complement that Whiting had ready to roll on his play sheets.
A four-play drive ended on Stephey’s 11-yard touchdown pass to Caleb Couse. Another four-play drive ended on Stephey’s three-yard touchdown run. And finally, faced with a much longer field, Stephey sprinted 63 yards on the seventh play for a 21-0 lead less than 10 minutes into the game.
“We come out fired up, ready to play and execute,” Stephey said. “We know what we need to do.”
Stephey’s numbers were again impressive. He rushed for 126 yards on eight carries and scored three touchdowns. He only needs four more to tie Ty Parks’ records of 56 rushing touchdowns and 57 overall touchdowns. And he completed 18 of 27 passes for 273 yards and two touchdowns.
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“We’re really nitpicky with him, but many people have seen him play enough now to know he’s a pretty elite high school football player,” Whiting said. “So we’re pretty hard on him as far as expectations of his reads and everything that he does. You don’t expect a kid to run for 130 and throw for over 200 every week, but it’s what he does, and he’s got really good teammates around him. He’s not alone, but he is an outstanding high school football player.”
Minster’s Connor Schmiesing scores on a 50 yard run.
In addition to the 63-yarder, Stephey also had a 58-yard touchdown run that pushed the lead to 35-7 in the third quarter.
“Line did a great job – there wasn’t much to it,” Stephey said and shrugged his shoulders. “Giant holes to run through.”
And more than enough speed by Stephey to get to the end zone without being challenged.
But for all the big numbers, big plays and long touchdowns, Whiting and his players aren’t satisfied. They failed to score in the second quarter, which allowed New Bremen to engineer a long drive and trail only 21-7 at halftime. The Wildcats have built big early leads in five of their wins, but they haven’t finished like they want.
“We kind of go into a little bit of a coast mode,” Whiting said. “You can’t do that, not against the teams we play. You have to put people away and end games. So that’s something that we got to continue to work on and fix.”
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Still, the Wildcats’ offense made big plays in the second half, scoring on Stephey’s second long run, Stephey’s 18-yard pass to fullback Isaac Larger and Connor Schmiesing’s 50-yard run.
“They’re a good team, and they can blitz you offensively in terms of just overwhelming you,” Schmidt said. “And it certainly felt like that at times tonight.”
Minster’s Tyler Bergman makes the beautiful circus catch.
Even with all of Minster’s big plays, the second quarter gave New Bremen hope. Sophomore quarterback Gavin Dicke began to connect with receivers because he had time to do so. He was 5-for-5 on a 75-yard drive and hit older brother and senior Grant Dicke with an eight-yard touchdown on fourth-and-three with 48 seconds left in the half.
“We took a heck of a haymaker early on, and it felt like we started to pick ourselves up a little bit,” Schmidt said. “I liked the response. That was great to see. We knew it still was a hill to climb.”
The halftime hope, however, quickly became a mountain to climb when Minster’s Dylan Heitkamp returned the second-half kickoff 78 yards for a 28-7 lead.
“Any momentum we thought we could use to maybe try to come out and make it closer went away pretty quick,” Schmidt said.
Dicke kept throwing in the second half and finished with 262 yards and two touchdowns on 18 of 31 completions. Running back Rogan Muether caught eight passes for 196 yards.
“He’s a young kid, and I think you saw that tonight at times with the inexperience, but also some growth,” Schmidt said of Dicke. “It was good for him.”
What will be good for Minster, the way Frimel sees it, is to get the entire team focused on every play, not just during fast starts and not just now and then. No more coasting.
“Most of us,” he said have a consistent focus. “But there’s some of us that definitely need to figure it out.”
That’s football in the trenches. There are no plays off.
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