The Geek spent much of 2022 serving up a dish on how compelling Crystal City football could turn out in 2023. How can we begin a brand-new season with a fresh angle on Hornet pigskin, after blogging so much hype already?
Let’s try peering into a Crystal Ball. The Gateway City science-fiction writer William Burroughs wrote that seeing into the future is actually an everyday thing, and not just a Sci-Fi fantasy, if only people are willing to accept a fuzzy outlook rather than 20-20 clairvoyance. For example, look at photographs of a woman from when she was 5, 10, 20, and 30 years old, and you will probably have a good idea what a photo of her at age 40 would look like…if anything, you’ll guess the wrong hair color or outfit, and get the other details correct. William’s analogy doesn’t usually fit the bill of predicting the future in High School sports, since lineups change before we see 3-4 years’ worth of them. But in Crystal City’s circumstances, it does. The Hornets’ team picture from this summer’s training camp will look awfully similar to 2022’s photo, except for the bigger bodies.
Festus, Grandview, and Windsor are also assembling small armies of seniors to play key roles on the gridiron in ’23. But the Sunken Place’s Class of 2024 stands out, and not just due to quality of athletes returning. Semesters of Iron Man pigskin have made the challenge of playing 2+ roles into second-nature for seniors like OL/LB Luke Holdinghausen, which helps to set Crystal City High’s starting lineup in stone even as the program’s thriving Junior High ranks bring more competition-for-minutes to Mississippi Avenue than ever before.
That’s a perk of previewing MSHSAA’s Class 1, where there are no 2-deep and 33-wide depth charts full of specialty role-players to confuse things. How did Hayti crush the entire Class 1 field in 2018, only to get blown-out by Valle U. all over again 11 months later? The Hayti Indians’ 6 or 7 phenomenal seniors played roles on offense, defense, and special teams during the tiny school’s championship run, the equivalent of 20+ scholarship seniors platooning for Jackson or SLUH in the same year. Iron Man football teams have very high peaks and low valleys.
The song “Iron Man” is about revenge, not cyborgs, and the Crystal City Hornet Class of 2024 has only begun taking its revenge on the larger, privileged pigskin brands who have punished MSHSAA’s smallest 11-man football school in the past. The Tri-City booster’s mystery is not whether Crystal will field more outstanding teams under Coach Dan Fox. The only question left is, How High Is Up?
Mississippi Magazine can forecast the vibe of each of Crystal City’s next 3 seasons, starting with the most inevitable headline lore of 2024. Next year will almost certainly be Eisenbeis’ year, a fall in which the senior-to-be’s many touchdowns may only be matched by his “T4L” (“tackles for loss”) when playing defense. Crystal City’s retooled defense will probably give up points along the road, but #12 has the raw potential to lead all of Jefferson County’s QBs in scoring them.
The Year of Our Lord 2025 will likely bring with it yet another winning record on Bradley’s Farm. Compton, DeRousse, Cale Schaumburg, Ricardo Pastrana, and more Class of ’26 seniors should form a seasoned nucleus that will strike dread in the heart of any cross-town opponent CCHS happens to play. (TGG suspects that Crystal City’s ongoing success will inspire at least the I-55 Conference, and perhaps others, to ask if CCHS wants back into the fold by then.)
Now, as for this year? This is the Ante-Up Year at Crystal City. The Kick-at-the-Can Year. The holy-heck, we’ve-got-a-chance-to-make-some-noise-in-this-thing year. It is The Geek’s opinion that the 2023 Crystal City Hornets will have underachieved if knocked-out of the playoffs prior to a District Championship Game appearance. To over-achieve, CCHS would have to stay alive through Turkey Day…and not to play fill-in at the Turkey Day Game in Kirkwood.
Crystal City’s prodigious running backs will garner most of the hype – and why not with 3 or 4 college prospects in the mix – but TGG is most excited to watch the Sunken Place defense. Lord, you wouldn’t want to be an opposing QB and face 3rd-and-10 against the Hornets, with Camden Mayes, Kanden Bolton, and Evan Wolfe welcoming 2-3 fast sophomores to a secondary that’s already been sizzling. In Rich Eisen’s lingo, CCHS’s speed in the open field is going to be a problem.
We’ve compared Crystal’s upstart defense to Jefferson High School’s ballers from 2020, the latter of whom count as the best local small-school defense TGG has witnessed since Ben Grady’s squad at Herculaneum in the 1990s. JHS’s formula in ’20 was a bit different than CCHS’s will be in ’23; Jefferson had a front-7 full of maulers and linebackers with the finest functional speed this side of Ladue High. Crystal City’s style on defense is more like something that a vintage NFL coach like L.A.’s John Robinson would be fond of. Rugged seniors Matt Bins and Seth Senter will be in charge of distracting opposing blockers at the point-of-attack, preventing any fancy downfield blocks, while CCHS’s crafty play-makers go racing to the pigskin. Hornet LBs and edge-rushers accounted for a whopping 250+ tackles and 9 or 10 QB sacks last season. Now-senior defensive backs Mayes and Logan Gerheardt combined for 55 tackles and 5 opposing turnovers in well under 9 full games as juniors.
With the fantastic frosh of ’22 returning in bigger, faster form, Crystal City’s D could soon become such a juggernaut that the media’s focus on point-scoring leads pundits the wrong way on the Hornets. CCHS’s defense, with all due respect to the ’23 offense and special teams, is the team’s legitimate “can’t miss” unit, at least on paper. One simply doesn’t come across Class 1 defenses that can line up a handful of solid linemen up front, 4+ outstanding LBs, and 5+ defensive backs with at least “NJCAA” foot speed. Put bluntly, Crystal City’s next 9 foes may do well to average 12+ points each. Chaffee High and Confluence Prep are on “Cumberland at Georgia Tech” watch.
Speaking of Chaffee, the Red Devils managed to knock Crystal City baseball – which features a majority of the top pigskin kids – out of the state playoffs again. However, the Hornets’ success in baseball helps to make a potential title on the gridiron feel like less of an impossible dream for Missouri’s smallest 11-man brand. CCHS Track & Field has had so much success in sprints, hurdles, and long jumping that it was bound to pay off for more team sports than just one. If Crystal City still hosts baseball on that antique ballfield without fences, where players can knock the bean beyond the outfielders and just keep running, TGG surmises that Kanden Bolton or another speedster covered on Mississippi Magazine will end his prep hardball career with at least 37 triples and an inside-the-park homer. (Regretfully, the old venue allows for no “out of the park” homers.)
Could thrills on the diamond add more momentum to a promising year on the tundra? It’s never a bad sign when your winning football team is found all-together making hay in another event. But it isn’t 100% peaches and cream for the Football Hornets going into autumn’s heady campaign. With an 8-2 record comes expectations, and there are still ingredients to a championship team that the Hornets must produce from scratch. Like a kickoff that goes 20 yards.
What “hurdles” could be too high for even Camden Mayes to jump on route to a District title? For one, Louisiana returning as “Piston Honda – World Circuit” and flipping the script in Week 10 was a reminder that “easy” schedules turn hard in a heartbeat. Annual opponents who hit a low-ebb point after COVID, like Van-Far (and some teams from our own Solar System also), could well be on the rebound by this October. Russellville fielded too many big, mobile athletes in last season’s controversial Week 6 tussle to have graduated all of them, and Gateway Tech could wreck any plans for a 9-0 start if the ’23 Jaguars make good use of a boosted lineup. Week 2’s road trip to LHS will put the Hornets under pressure to take retribution for October’s depressing let-down.
Crystal goes into its seminal season with only about 25 boys again, well below The Geek’s glowing prediction of 30-to-40 kids on the new team. At least a couple of part-time performers from 2022’s freshman corps have transferred to Florida Atlantic St. Pius X to play for the new Lancer head coach Frank Ray, whose roster building effort threatens to make him the Lane Kiffin of Jefferson County. (Regretfully, to become Kiffin, Ray would also have to turn into a slinky, sleazy character instead of the stand-up coach who helped HHS win a championship last year. He would also have to learn how to act out Kiffin’s “wide-eyed innocence” routine when asked if he had anything to do with a student’s shock transfer.)
The Geek’s whiff on the ’23 roster size wasn’t due to an exodus, though, but rather because of another mistake in Mississippi Magazine’s first year of dot-com reports. There is no such thing as the “CCHS 8th Grade Team,” just like Crystal City school district has no “Varsity” team but a Grades 9-12 lineup that competes against Varsity teams. TGG assumed CCHS’ 8th Grade branding on YouTube reels was accurate, because you only need 11-12 players to get through a Junior High league’s half-timed, small-collision training games, and since so many boys try out in youth football who never stick it out until they’re 18. But a tiny school’s staff is smart to go with an all-combined Middle School bid permanently, putting all eligible tryouts on one team, for 2 reasons – 1) You never wind up with under 11 kids and have to adjust on the fly, surprising a 12-year-old blocker with the news that he’s going up against 16-year-old “Beefy Flunkington” of Union on short notice, and 2) pitting even the youngest kids against “Beefy Flunkington” is a way to put Crystal City ballplayers behind the 8-Ball from the beginning, thus preparing them for the hardship of playing for a “High School” squad against 10-thru-12 Varsity lineups.
Because there were so few “seniors” on last year’s Middle School team, there are only 4 freshmen joining the 2023 High School lineup. But the awesome (and lucky) news is that they’re exactly the right new players to help Crystal City bigly, whether they happen to have Cale Schaumburg-level frosh years or not. 3 of 4 freshmen are hefty linemen who flourished on the 5-1 “8th Grade” team of ’21, which means the Sunken Place has once again been rescued from the brink via the new arrivals. Otherwise, the ’23 Hornets could have become so meager in large bodies that the school’s offensive and defensive line efforts became sad tales of injury. New heavyweights in the mix could fix that kind of numbers issue right away. Holdinghausen, Bins, and Senter are 3 names that TGG does NOT want to see toiling in the 4th quarter vs Confluence Prep.
Fox has 2 problems yet to solve if he wants to be coaching in Week 13. For a start, CCHS’s veteran line showed more aptitude for breaking blocks on defense than in throwing blocks for its talented RBs last year. Without the ball, Senter’s boys won or stalemated the trenches in every contest but the Russellville game. By contrast, the offense was feast-or-famine, and Crystal’s 8-2 mark relied too often on special kids making long gallops. Herky, Bayless, and Van-Far’s defenses stymied CCHS up front, and the ’22 Hornets were consistently subject to dull 3-and-outs (or 4-and-outs, given Fox’s aversion to punting) whether or not the OL was facing a strong opponent. That has to change, especially with huge OL/DL lineups like East Buchanan’s now setting the bar in Class 1.
Eisenbeis’ backfield will run around tacklers and make Crystal’s offense look great 90% of the time. The danger is that a lack of “POP!” from the OL could hurt the Hornets against a tough team when CCHS can least afford it. West Plains, for example, had the defense to defeat Ladue in 2018’s playoffs, but discovered it was poised to score only 2-3 times at most in the quarterfinal. WPHS panicked, and spotted the Rams a 2-touchdown lead with turnovers and blown coverages in the defensive backfield. Zat was all-zee-wrote for zee Zizzers.
If the Crystal City offensive line vaults into the “elite” category, then the shell-shocked supporters at Sunken Place will be staring at a Hornet buzz-saw that goes deep into the MSHSAA playoffs. But can the blocking get there in ’23? That is sadly where our Crystal Ball runs out of steam. (Caressing it spookily and shouting “POOOOOIIIII-ZZZZUUUUNNNN!” won’t help.)
Problem #2 – the special-teams issue – isn’t so practical. In effect, Fox’s choice to either upgrade Crystal’s kicking game, or keep “punting” on every special-teams turn is a moral one.
If the otherwise amazing HC continues to call for “Yawn-Side” kickoffs of 10 yards each, and continues to run off-tackle on 4th and 10 from his team’s own 45-yard line, he’ll be guilty of accidental sabotage, tying one arm behind the back of a defense that could knock-out Crystal City’s District rivals.
For a team as exciting as CCHS to just hand the bean over on the 50-yard line (or worse) all season would be a crying shame, since there’s so much the Hornets can achieve on a level footing.
“But the kicking game is practical,” you might say. “If we don’t have a decent kicker, then how can we gain field position on a kickoff?” Ah, but don’t forget that while other 7-year-olds were trading WrestleMania cards, The Geek was watching High School football. Crystal City has a fast, sure-tackling set of linebackers. Tack-on coverage men from a super-duper defensive backfield, and that makes one of the fastest kick coverage units in the county. Don’t have a real kicker? Then just ask a big, fat backup lineman to take a running start, boot a crude knuckle-ball 30+ yards, and away you go. High School teams of another era used to do that even if they had real kickers. Likewise, you can Rugby Punt successfully without a “real” punter, and mire an offense in 3-down-only territory. Fox’s all-grown-up D will produce tons of 3-and-outs…if opposing teams don’t start their drives in 4-down territory about 75% of the time.
TGG saved the best part of Crystal’s preview for last. CCHS will not, we repeat, NOT face a loaded C1 District bracket this season, and that goes whether or not Duchesne is promoted to Class 2. Last year’s Nightmare From Elm Street has waved farewell to more exceptional seniors than any Greater STL powerhouse since DeSmet in 2020-21. Alum QB Josh Baker-Mayes’ critical accuracy will be absent for the first time since 2020, along with the Pioneers’ leading WR Cameron Lee, all 3 of last year’s rushing leaders, and half of a dozen sturdy linemen. Duchesne’s Class of ’24 includes few bodies and fewer standouts.
It took a “Hayti 2018” combination of 300 lb. blockers and an NCAA backfield for the reigning East Buchanan Bulldogs to beat Duchesne in the 2022 state tournament. But it won’t take such a legendary cast to beat the Pioneers this time, even if Crystal turns out to have one. (Not incidentally, East Buchanan’s most pivotal 2022 Show-Me Bowl heroes are alumni now too.)
There’s a chance MSHSAA could move riverside teams over to Class 1, District 1 where they belong, but CCHS won’t be betting against a stacked deck no matter which of last fall’s District 1 or District 2 teams are slotted into the Hornets’ playoff bracket. Grumblings out of the campuses nearby hint that other Tri-City teams’ limitations could be as plain as their strengths this November, and the only private school that’s been drawn into C1D1 consistently is St. Vincent. St. Vinny’s follows Missouri rules and doesn’t artificially stack its team. We know this every time the Indians are losing to Valle University by a YMCA basketball score after 24:00.
Here it is, Hornets. The path to a season of glory is clear, at least until a pack of east-side Bulldogs comes calling. Why not take a kick at the can, and breathe new life into Old Town with a MSHSAA miracle?