How Center Grove built an IHSAA football dynasty: Talent, hard work and start 'em young
BARGERSVILLE — This does not happen.
High school football programs in Indiana’s largest class do not stack championships like poker chips. You take a turn in the winner’s circle, get dragged from the mountaintop, then fight like crazy to get back there again.
For years after Warren Central’s run of four consecutive Class 5A championships from 2003 to ’06, that was the cycle. Carmel won 5A in 2007. Then Center Grove. Warren Central. Fishers. Carmel. Lawrence Central. When the Indiana High School Athletic Association added a sixth class in 2013, it followed a similar pattern. Warren Central won in 2013, then Ben Davis, Center Grove, Carmel, Ben Davis, Warren Central and Carmel.
A lot of the same programs, taking turns. Amazingly, no repeat winners in 15 years in the state’s largest class. Until now. Center Grove won 6A in 2020. They did it again, undefeated again, in 2021. Then when the door appeared to open ever-so-slightly last season for contenders like Hamilton Southeastern, Brownsburg and Cathedral, the Trojans slammed it shut with decisive wins over Cathedral in the semistate and Carroll (Fort Wayne) in the state finals.
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On Saturday in Canton, Ohio, Center Grove will take on one of the nation’s top teams, the two-time Division I Ohio state champions, St. Edward. It marks the start of a season that could end with the Trojans holding the 6A trophy for a fourth consecutive year.
This does not happen. But it is. How does a program ascend from “one of” the best in the state to the current standard? There is more than one answer, of course, but it starts on a 38-acre patch of green grass 5 minutes south of the high school in Bargersville.
It is here, on a few weeknights in July, where the cars fill the paved parking lot and kids from kindergarten to sixth grade run through drills coordinated by high school players wearing red jerseys. Just a few years ago, they were those kids. And years before that, the youth coaches patrolling the fields with whistles around their necks were those kids.
It is a football circle of life on the Center Grove Bantam Football League’s five football fields. But the fields are just fields without an investment. On this July night, Aaron Halterman, who played here and now has third-grade son playing in the bantam league, is talking about the program as he catches sight of the 62-year-old at the center of this success.
Fans might see the success Eric Moore has on Friday nights. The 236 wins. The five state championships. But they might not know the time Moore has invested here on the bantam league fields, where he willingly spends his Saturday afternoons instead of kicking his feet up and watching college football.
“I’ve never seen this kind of commitment at any level,” said Halterman, who played tight end at Indiana and earned a Super Bowl ring with the Colts as a member of the practice squad. “He’s out here every Saturday. The way I look at it is if you care about the kids, and the kids know who you are, you are going to get the best out of them.”
Eric Moore has built Center Grove 'from the bottom up.'
Moore does not spend too much time in one place during the bantam camp, bouncing from one field to the next. At various points, he makes announcements over the loudspeakers.
“We want to wish Amanda Chriswell a happy 51st birthday,” Moore announces at one point during a drill. Which seems like a genuine sentiment until Chriswell, one of Moore’s first students at Center Grove in 1999, finds him, jokingly punches him the arm and points out she is, ahem, not 51.
“You know the buzz you started around here!?” says Chriswell, who has two sons of her own, in fifth and third grade, playing in the bantam league.
There is a small-town feel on the sprawling facility, which is part of the idea. When Moore came to Center Grove to interview for the job in the spring of 1999, one of the first places he visited was the bantam complex, which moved to its current location the previous year. Previously, the youth league was headquartered on two fields at the middle school. “One that was basically a dirt patch,” Halterman said.
When Moore came to interview, Larry Collins drove him to the bantam fields.
“We’ve got something here,” Moore told Collins, who served six years as the president of the bantam league and was instrumental in helping Moore lay the groundwork. One of the fields is named for Collins, who died in 2006 at age 58.
“By having this,” said Moore, sitting at a picnic table in the middle of the complex, “you knew this would be the starting point where I could get to them young if they bought the bill of goods I was selling them in 1999.”
Center Grove was the 17th-largest school in the state at the time, though its enrollment was around 1,550 students. The Trojans had fielded a successful program, finishing undefeated in 1975 and enjoying a run of success under coach Kevin King in the 1990s. But other than a regional title in 1987, Center Grove was regularly ousted in the sectional by the likes of Decatur Central, Bloomington South and Martinsville.
A turning point came in 1996 when Center Grove was one of the charter members to start the Metropolitan Interscholastic Conference. It was a move that was met with some resistance.
“We were a smaller school in the MIC,” said Andy Moore (no relation), who played on Moore’s first team in 1999. “There were a lot of people, bantam people included, who didn’t want Center Grove to join the MIC.”
Center Grove went 5-5 in Moore’s first season, hardly a harbinger of things to come. But the following year, Center Grove upset fifth-ranked Carmel 10-9 on quarterback/kicker Kyle Geiger’s 30-yard field goal in the final minutes. “That was kind of a taking off point for the foundation of where the program first started,” said Andy Moore, who was a senior that season.
The 2000 team remains a special group to Eric Moore. The Trojans took advantage of seven Ben Davis turnovers to stun James Banks and defending state champion Ben Davis in the semistate, 30-28, and reach the state championship for the first time. Center Grove lost the next week, 21-0, to Penn in the state finals, but the fuse was lit.
“That first year, a third of the team liked me, a third of them didn’t like me and a third of them had no idea,” Moore said. “We had 77 kids on that team that went to state. The community went crazy. But I thought they went crazy because they knew it was never going to happen again. We beat that great Ben Davis team that probably should have won three or four in a row (the Giants won titles in 1999, 2001 and ’02). But I don’t think anyone expected it.”
While it was unexpected, it also showed what was possible. Moore had the attention of the community. “He had instant success,” Andy Moore said. “That always helps.” But the building blocks in crafting success on Friday nights, in the coach’s mind, started on those bantam fields.
“Growing up here down on this grass — looking the same, being the same, being one, it’s easy,” Moore said. “I’m not sharing kids with another school corporation. But the toughness level has never changed. Every year, expectations are the same. You have to be tough. You have to work hard and run hard and lift hard. The football part will come to us. But you have to be willing to work.”
With the work, the rewards. Eventually they did come for the Trojans. The first state championship in 2008, a memorable and improbable 36-33 comeback win over Carmel, came in 2008 in the first state finals at Lucas Oil Stadium. The second title in 2015 over Penn came after a 35-34 double-overtime thriller in the semistate over Avon. There were near-misses in the state finals in 2016 and ’19 against Carmel before the current run started in 2020.
“He’s built it from the bottom up,” said Andy Moore, who coached on the Center Grove staff for 13 years. “It’s been fun to watch the repeated success. I think it’s tough for those Westsiders or Eastsiders to admit, but I think they know Center Grove is here to stay and not going anywhere.”
'They are like family to me.'
The connections from player generation to player generation do not happen by accident. Moore is meticulous about the bantam team numbers, which could change year to year based on the top players’ numbers on the varsity team.
This year, for example, there will be a No. 15 (Tyler Cherry), a No. 8 (Owen Bright) and a No. 3 (Noah Coy) on every team. Why? When those kids come to the games on Friday nights, they will wear those jerseys and see those players on the field.
“The kids can relate,” Moore said. “They seen No. 3 and they are like, ‘Oh yeah, I had him in camp. That’s Noah Coy.’”
Cherry, a senior quarterback and Duke recruit, grew up going to games back to second grade. “Max ‘the Rock’ Norris was the running back,” Cherry said. “It was always the goal (for me) to be the quarterback. It was hard to imagine back then, but as I kept growing and getting older, it turned to reality. Playing my first game last year against Warren, coming out and seeing the student section packed, was just awesome.”
At the bantam league level, coaches are expected run to run the traditional wing-T offensive plays Center Grove has utilized since Moore’s tenure began.
“When it comes to X’s and O’s, we still run the same base offense that the high school runs,” said Brent Lay, who played on Moore’s first team and is the current bantam league president. “They mix things up a little bit more now (in high school), but we still run the wing-T and the 4-3 defense. By the time they are in middle school they have been running these plays for years.”
If a coach chooses to go rogue and air it out? Well, he won’t be coaching long. George Lidy, the brother of Mt. Vernon coach Vince Lidy and son of John Lidy, who won two state championships at Castle, calls it a “philosophical continuity” that he sees with the program since he got started coaching in 2020.
“It trickles down,” Lidy said. “You have assistant coaches on the high school staff who have been there a long time, former players in the feeder program who have settled here as young adults. They’re coaching their kids and they are coming into the program. It’s great continuity from top to bottom. I talk to my brother about it. ‘How do you start it? How do you develop it?’ From what I’ve seen there are a lot of men and women that have been committed for a long time to make it what it is.”
Moore said he is asked “probably twice a week” about building a successful youth program. He shares his thoughts. It takes a significant financial investment. The Center Grove Bantam League operates as a non-profit organization and receives sponsorships from local businesses. “Everywhere I look,” Moore said, “there are sponsors who played for us.”
But the biggest investment is time and effort. Moore downplays his own impact on the bantam league program, but the coaches who played for him and are now coaching in the league said his presence is the biggest reason it has thrived. Lay said there are 460 tackle football participants and almost 900 in all when flag football and cheerleading are combined.
“I can’t imagine how many hours he puts in,” Lay said. “I’m sure most guys would rather being doing something else right now, but he loves being here. He lives for this. We wouldn’t see this many people involved if he wasn’t here as much.”
Moore, who turns 62 this month, is home here. Sitting near the coaches — most his former players — he listens as they evaluate the bantam league players for their upcoming draft. “Sandbagging,” he said with a laugh. Moore moves a little slower than he used to. He went back in for successful surgery two weeks ago to remove four tumors that had returned in his bladder. It was his sixth surgery as he continues his cancer fight.
“I don’t feel bad,” he said. “I’ve been blessed. I come out here and I feel good. I go home at night and it hurts to lay down. But when I’m around football and the kids, that’s cool.”
A few minutes later, Moore gets up from the picnic table and starts to walk to the parking lot. The bantam coaches, his former players are huddled around a different table nearby. “Love you guys,” Moore says. “Love you, coach,” they respond as he walks toward the lot, past a field that now has his name, a surprise from his former players.
It takes great players. Hours of work. Weights. Sprints. High standards. Community involvement and facility upgrades. But there is nothing like family.
“It’s easy for me to want to be here because I love them all,” Moore said. “They are like family to me. How many guys get to see the guys who played for them 24 years ago, let alone see them for six to seven months? There are a lot of great programs that have great tradition. But in the end, they don’t have this. They don’t have this family to come back to.”
Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IHSAA football: How Eric Moore turned Center Grove into Indiana power
