Troy quarterback Aiden Kirkpatrick celebrates one of his two touchdowns in the Trojans’ 28-7 win over Piqua. (Press Pros Feature Photos by Lee Woolery)
Trojans senior quarterback Aiden Kirkpatrick moved the chains with hard running, precise passing and scored twice. And the Trojans defense kept Piqua from gaining momentum after a first-quarter touchdown and a halftime tie.
Troy, OH – Outside the locker room Friday night, a Troy football player was looking for senior quarterback Aiden Kirkpatrick, the MVP of the annual The Battle on the Miami.
“Where’s 7?” the voice shouted.
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No. 7, in case you didn’t know, is Kirkpatrick. He was close by, smiling and celebrating a 28-7 victory over Piqua, the Trojans’ third straight in the 141st edition of the historic series and the third one in which he has been the starting quarterback.
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Kirkpatrick also goes by AK. But he answers to 7 more than anything when head coach Troy Everhart is around.
“He calls me 7 and quarterback,” Kirkpatrick said as he grinned and shrugged his shoulders as if to say he likes the monikers.
Troy (3-1, 3-0 Miami Valley League) might consider adding a couple digits to 7’s uniform. It would be appropriate to refer to the quarterback, a player Everhart earlier this season said is the best player in the Miami Valley League, as 007.
Because 7 has a license to run, a license to pass, a license to score … a license to make whatever play his team needs. And he made use of all those licenses to rally his team to three second-half touchdowns (scoring two himself) on the Trojans’ only three possessions.
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“When our offense needs somebody to ride behind, they can always ride behind him,” senior defensive end Logan Westerfield said. “Our defense gets the stop, we always have faith in him, knowing that when we come off the field, we have someone great going out there to score for us.”
Tied 7-7 at halftime, the Troy defense didn’t allow Piqua a first down to start the second half. To veteran Piqua coach Bill Nees, that stop shaped the second-half momentum.
Piqua quarterback Chris Davis scores the Indians’ only touchdown.
“We thought we should have been able to get out and move football, and we didn’t,” he said. “That is an explosive offense, and we could not give them that many opportunities.”
Troy’s offense, as it normally does when it’s humming, flowed off 7’s legs and right arm. On the three touchdown drives, he carried the ball on 12 of the 16 running plays, gaining 55 yards, most of them after contact, bullying his way to first downs and into the end zone. Just to mix it up a little he completed all eight passes he threw to seven different players for 116 yards.
No. 7 capped the first two drives with touchdown runs of five and eight yards for a 21-7 lead with 11:56 left. On the last drive, he kept the ball on a naked bootleg for 17 yards to the five. Then in a moment of letting someone else steal the scene, 7 handed off to Landen Adkins for a five-yard touchdown on his only carry.
“We really just came together and played as a team,” 7 said. “The first two plays of the game we had 10 guys on the field, so our minds weren’t right. We figured it out in the second half.”
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For the game, 7 rushed for 125 yards on 20 carries to surpass 500 yards. He completed 12 of 13 passes for 137 yards. The only incompletion was his first pass. Ten different players caught at least one pass.
As much as 7 does to help Troy win, Everhart wants the offense to become less dependent on the quarterback. The rest of the running game accounted for 52 yards on 13 attempts.
Piqua running back Debo Knisley takes a chunk of his 158 yards rushing for the game.
“When 7 is not going or we’re not running him, per se, like we did in the first quarter, we’ve got to have other things working,” Everhart said. “In the second half, once he got working, everything else was working. But we’ve got to be able to play team offense just as much as we play team defense. Even though 7 is the distributor, when we hand the ball off, we’ve got to get hard yards, and right now up front, those five guys have got to improve if we’re going to continue to make any kind of damage.”
Everhart also said he thought his team slipped too easily into “this is going to be easy” mode after Kayden Franklin returned the opening kickoff 99 yards for a sudden 7-0 lead.
“To start the game off that kickoff return was not at the best start, but I think we dug ourselves out of that pretty well,” Nees said.
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Nees isn’t counting moral victories, but he is encouraged by what he’s seeing from this year’s team. Piqua is 1-3 and 1-2 in the league coming off 4-6 and 2-8 seasons.
“This team battles,” he said. “We were a good team last year. Two years ago, yeah, we overcame that, and we’re back to being competitive and hopefully being relevant in the conversation every year.”
The Indians were relevant Friday as they controlled the rest of the first half. And Nees has found a running back in senior Debo Knisley who made his first start last week and rushed for 139 yards. Not often does a 5-foot-6, 141-pounder get the workhorse load, much of it between the tackles. But Knisley did with 158 yards on 28 carries, bouncing and darting to more yards than often seemed available.
Troy’s Asher Merritt took advantage of open ground during the second half of Friday’s win over Piqua.
Knisley carried the ball on six of seven plays on the Indians’ touchdown drive. Troy was ready for another Knisley carry when it bought the fake handoff and sophomore quarterback Chris Davis kept the ball for a three-yard touchdown and a 7-7 tie late in the first quarter.
“He’s a quick little guy, bounced back a lot, but once we figured out what we were doing wrong, what we needed to do, couldn’t do anything,” Westerfield said. “Just holding our edge, making sure we weren’t ducking inside gaps too early, making sure each and every one of us was doing our job. Before we were just trying to make plays.”
The Trojans’ disciplined approach bent some in the second half, gave up some first downs, but forced two punts and turned the Indians over on downs once.
“We just didn’t want to let them score again,” Westerfield said. “We want to let our offense know that no matter what happens on that side of the ball, they can always count on us to not let us fall behind.”
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Troy senior Aidan Gorman fumbled twice in the first half, but it didn’t stop him from being a blocker and playing strong defense in the secondary, twice tripping up Knisley as the last line of defense.
“He was a true competitor just trying to get things done,” Everhart said. “He’s made already so many big plays for us. It’s unfortunate it was back to back, but he’ll bounce back. He’s a resilient kid.”
‘7’ rings up a second touchdown in the second half of the Trojans’ win over Piqua.
Resilience is why Troy has beaten Piqua the past three years to earn a 69-66-6 edge in the series. The seniors were on the freshman team and watched the varsity lose 59-0 in 2022.
“The first year they were like we hired a new guy everything will change,” said Everhart, whose first season was 2022. “Well, no it didn’t. It was worse than ever. But then the mentality changed, and the kids did great.”
Since then, the Trojans have won 14-0, 21-7 and now 28-7.
“That freshman year they blew us out, and then we set a goal we were going to go 3-0 against them and bring the trophy back to this town, and we accomplished that goal,” 7 said. “It feels so good inside. It’s an amazing feeling.”
The sophomore class that helped create the turnaround is now 28 seniors strong. Senior leadership is strong for the Trojans like it was in 2023 when they shared the league title with Tippecanoe. Last year the leadership fell.
“We just failed to monitor the leadership piece of it last year because we thought we had it locked down from the year before,” he said. “Just wasn’t the case. Still great kids, but now this group, they saw the difference, and they’re like, no, this is what we need to do. They hold each other just as accountable as the coaches do.”
And they all lean on 7 to make them go.
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