Problems mount for Griffith’s program
Geffert’s departure is troubling news for Griffith football
Geffert’s sudden departure could mean troubling news for upcoming season.
Was it really that long ago that Russ Radtke was prowling the Griffith sidelines, veins bulging out of his neck, leading the team to a Class 4A state title with the most devastating high school rushing attack I’ve ever witnessed?
That championship came in 1997. Until Radtke’s last breath on the Griffith sideline, which was in 2011, the Panthers were a force. He would have it no other way.
Since then, it’s been a rocky ride for the program.
Ben Geffert quit as the Griffith head coach earlier this month so he could take a teaching position and an assistant coaching job at Munster. Geffert didn’t return my calls or texts and Munster wouldn’t confirm he’s going to be hired as a coach.
But his LinkedIn account gives it away.
It lists him as an assistant coach for Munster. His hiring should be official at a July 8 school board meeting.
Let’s see.
Munster couldn’t field a junior varsity team for a full season in 2018, it finished 2-8 and the Mustangs have never had the kind of sustained, consistent success that Griffith once had.
Munster does not have a program that is on solid ground.
This is not a step up for Geffert or a step sideways. It’s a tacit acknowledgment that he had to find the nearest exit quickly, and that an assistant’s job was better than the head coaching job at Griffith.
Geffert was a Griffith guy, graduating in 2007.
Geffert was good, taking a team that had three straight losing seasons to a sectional title game in 2016.
He brought energy, and a new offensive philosophy to the Boneyard, Griffith’s football field.
He abandoned the option, and adopted a spread offense. Geffert wrote a touching note on the Griffith football Facebook page, thanking his players, his assistant coaches and his family for their support. He ended by writing that as “I move forward, I may be wearing a different color but I will ALWAYS bleed BLACK and GOLD.”
Geffert finished 30-16 in five seasons.
Why leave a program that was so special?
Because it’s not that special anymore.
Griffith made the single greatest administrative athletic blunder I’ve seen in 26 years covering high school sports when it left the Northwest Crossroads Conference for the Greater South Shore Conference.
The Panthers went from prime time to out of sight. Gone were natural rivalry games with Hobart, Andrean, Lowell and Highland.
They were replaced with teams like River Forest, Calumet and Wheeler. The Panthers outscored their opponents 42443 in their first year in the GSSC. The conference season was a snooze.
And it did nothing to prepare Griffith for the playoffs, when it had to play Lowell twice and it lost by a total of 66 points.
There were never official explanations about why Griffith left, only murky suggestions that shrinking enrollment was making it hard to be competitive.
The real reason was perhaps that the people at the top were upset when the NCC asked for public contrition from Griffith for its role in the ugly brawl that broke out in a boys basketball game with Hammond in 2015. Video of the fight went viral. News outlets showed the fight over and over again. Griffith and Hammond got into a bitter legal dispute with the IHSAA, which wanted both schools to forfeit the rest of their season. The Panthers resisted the call for an apology, and abruptly departed in a fit.
Whatever the truth, the move from the NCC to the GSSC hurt the football program the most.
Basketball and baseball have room to tweak their schedules to keep those rival games. It’s much harder in football with a nine-game season, where seven conference games are usually locked in. The Panthers dropped to five conference games this year and put Hobart and Lowell back on the schedule.
The move devalued the program. Geffert never publicly complained but it mattered. At Munster, Geffert returns to his roots in this sense.
He’s back in the NCC, where he can help rebuild a program.
And, as a Griffith graduate, he can hope the school’s leaders figure out how to get back to the NCC, where it still belongs.