“St. Pius takes a 39-36 lead with seconds left in an instant classic! This is the reason why we play and watch football! St. Pius X and Monroe City, having one of the best games in Missouri history!!!” – J.B. Connoley, 104.7 KRES
The 2025 St. Pius Lancers season was the most thrilling in local Small Schools canon. Technical points, like the attendance at Herky and Warrenton’s 1995 barnburner that made the Blackcats two-time state finalists, or that Festus High was a small school in a country town when the Tigers earned pre-MSHSAA state honors in the late 1940s, are flatly beside the issue. The Dirty Dozen’s region wasn’t a Friday Night Lights hotbed then. It is now! Whichever candidate stepped up its game the most would have the chance to become 2025’s “most exciting team ever,” since 2023-thru-’25 are the three most epic years of breakthrough success that JeffCo’s gridiron has ever seen, and the illustrious Lancers’ rise in popularity goes hand-in-hand with that.
SPX saw at least 15 of its football kids recruited by NCAA and NAIA scouts this offseason, perhaps the largest number of such prospects ever on a Class 2-size campus south of St. Louis. There were an equal number of 15 Lancers voted onto the 2025 C2D1 All-District Team, another milestone for St. Pius pigskin.
Seldom has there felt like a more perfect time to move a football team into a brand-new stadium.
Hill Valley’s championship trek snuck up on everyone last fall, including The Geek. Week 1’s sloppy defeat in Caruthersville, combined with the presence of St. Vincent and Jefferson in the Lancers’ Class 2 District, could’ve made spectators think the Tigers would face the Indians or the Blue Jays in Week 12. After all, the Lancers and “Week 12” have not clung in conjunction often over the years, to say nothing of the prospect of SPX winning a District title. St. Pius lost a lopsided contest in Week 8, but after a slate-ending corker at Valle, the Lancers blitzed through the whole bracket on a 5-0 streak.
The lateness of the Lancers’ surge gave the 2025-26 offseason a special spark. Heck, it’s hard to talk about Hill Valley’s 2026 season prospects in Class 3 without also discussing the promoted program’s offseason, which beat Ipswich Town’s by a factor of 10x thanks to some crazy feats on the hardcourt.
Frank Knows Basketball, Too
For most folks, the stadium project on the 61-67 junction was the talk of this St. Pius offseason. For the dorky all-sports hacks who volunteer at Mississippi Magazine? It was the basketball. THE BASKETBALL!
When they spend New Year’s Eve bangin’ and clangin’ in SPX’s weight room, they don’t get a chance to watch and learn from the Duke Blue Devils. The St. Pius X Varsity Boys Basketball team spent much of 2024, 2025, and 2026 among the sob-stories of Jefferson County sports, finishing 2-22 in 2024-25 before carrying a horrid 29-game losing streak into February of this year. AD Tilden Watson was moved to dismiss former HC Matt Smith last midseason without having an obvious choice for an interim.
Football head coach Frank Ray was approached, and agreed to fill the vacuum as the interim Boys Basketball coach. It’s not an unprecedented move for a school with a successful pigskin coach. But it’s risky. Basketball coaching on a lark has foiled many gridiron greats. In fact, it is often a recipe for disaster. The Geek knows of two iffy incidents that involved hella-famous football coaches!
Vince Lombardi – yup, Mister Vince Lombardi – had a brief gig coaching Boys Basketball at St. Cecilia, in New York state, in the 1940s. The young Lombardi thought he was tough enough to handle another rough sport, having been encouraged to recruit-and-reform local delinquents by a Jesuit administration that was simply fanatical about prevailing in pigskin. (Story has it that when Vinny-Vici’s ornery football gang was sent marching through town to practice on an alternate gridiron, they constantly stole goodies from the fruit stands. One of Lombardi’s priest pals would shout “Didn’t I tell ya!” and whack them with a stick.)
Lombardi’s hoops team played well and won many games. His first motto, “Winning isn’t a sometimes thing, it’s an all-the-time thing” translated well to any sport. But when a late-season tournament pitted St. Cecilia against a highly-ranked squad in New York, the opposing coach saw no reason why his team needed to win the round. So, without a shot clock to worry about, they stalled the basketball.
The players, fans, and coaches in the gym grew sleepy. But not Lombardi. He was turning beet-red in the face, barking orders, and glaring at the other coach. When his cagers moved up to guard the motionless opposing PG, Lombardi yelled, “Don’t guard him! Leave the lane open! Maybe he’ll shoot one!” Finally, shots were taken, and St. Cecilia won a ragged fourth quarter (and the game) by the score of 19-15.
People came to congratulate the Little Saints bench on a “major upset.” A fuming Lombardi brushed past them, making a Danica Patrick Walk toward the opposing HC. The future Super Bowl icon was so furious that the men had to be grappled by security guards. “How dare you keep the superior team from playing to win!” thundered Lombardi. “Winning’s not a sometimes thing! It’s an all-the-time thing!!!”
Paul Johnson, the innovative Orange Bowl champion who coached Georgia Tech and Navy, nearly came to blows with a basketball referee when he was coaching the Avery County Vikings in 1980. Johnson’s counterpart had inserted a “Jorge Gonzales”-style opposing cager into the fray, an awkward but massive specimen at about 6’6” and 300 pounds. “I just wanted to check the scoresheet,” Johnson told the referee during a timeout, “to see if you ever called a foul on that big clumsy center like you called on my guys.”
“You want a foul?” asked the referee.
“Yes, I would like a foul,” Johnson replied.
“Fine. Technical foul. And if you mouth off again, you’ll get another one,” the referee said, walking away.
“Listen,” Johnson growled, hopping across the sideline before assistant coaches could subdue him. “If you T me up again, you’ll have to read the paper to find out who won, because I’m gonna knock you out!”
Johnson was ejected, and gave up coaching basketball soon thereafter.
How could Coach Ray do any better than two gridiron legends? Who knows, but he did! Ray somehow turned the Lancers around on the hardwood in record time, going on a six-game win streak, and scoring a monumental playoff upset over the Jefferson Blue Jays.
We thought that MSHSAA’s lack of creative football bracketing would match two seething Highway 61 rivals against each other in a Friday Night Lights playoff game before administrators could kiss and make up, but instead, St. Pius X won its long-awaited grudge match via 32 minutes of squeaking. Harrison Ray scored 37 points, Brody Ervin snagged double-digit rebounds, and the Lancers won 65-59 to advance to the District finals.
The St. Pius X vs Jefferson playoff game occurred at Kingston. However, the subsequent District title tilt was at Jefferson High, where the St. Pius Lancers played to 100% cheers and 0% boos as Valley Park won by another “poetic” final score of 88-55. Three summers ago, JCAA snots were running around kicking 15-year-old girls off softball fields for wearing Lancers jerseys. This past winter, the same grownups had to swallow hard and let Hill Valley play a championship game at Blue Jay Way.
Coach Ray must seem like a miracle worker to the St. Pius administration at this point. He has already broken school records as the gridiron HC. Now, the talented coach can add “cured a previously bad basketball team” to his resume, without having had any experience coaching hoops beforehand!
Ray did it by reusing his football philosophy: Be honest, cooperate, and THINK BIG. The skipper put a Chuck Daly playbook in the kids’ hands, wisely surmising that the strategies of the 1990s Detroit Pistons and the original Dream Team would pique the teens’ interest more than trying to copy Principia. But on another tack, the interim coach told his cagers to stop attempting to snap the losing streak, and to concentrate on their own performance. By measuring their success on a different gauge than wins-and-losses, the Lancers started having fun again, and the Ws began to appear.
The hoops turnaround can inspire St. Pius pigskin in two ways. One is the obvious way – the basketball team’s plurality of football kids are happy to know that they’re versatile enough to defy the odds in any sport. Yet in a broader sense, the players learned that Ray’s sermons about desire and “will over skill” aren’t just talk that’s designed to bring about fuller tryouts, harder workouts, and success down the road. Self-motivation to practice and play hard makes a difference immediately. Yes, athletes can simply will themselves to have a better day, a better game, and a better record. The proof was in the pudding this February, when the Lancers went from zeros to heroes in hoops. Or, at least it was in the squeaking.
Y’all Still Have Your Football Cleats, Right?
How good is the St. Pius Lancers defense about to be? The best way that The Geek can word it is that if Festus or Hillsboro were boasting the type of lineup Hill Valley can put in front of 2026’s opposing QBs, you’d be darned excited about them. There’s a “Large Schools” flair in the variety of size, speed, power, experience, and depth – yes, depth – that the Lancers defense brings to the gridiron. A continent of the team’s scholarship players will start on offense. Virtually all of them will contribute to the defense.
St. Pius edge-rusher Hunter Hylton could have made the “Jefferson Jackrabbits” All-Star Team’s lineup in 2025’s postseason if he hadn’t been ailing with a long-term injury, the same bummer that kept Hillsboro’s alum Preston Brown from starring on 2024’s All-Star Team. Hylton, who earned All-State honors via his exploits in the first three months of Hill Valley’s breakthrough year, is one of those quick, 205-pound TFL-”hunters” who we associate with great Class 3 feats. But given the cast of characters surrounding Hylton, the junior could produce “Class 5” numbers against premier opponents.
The Lancers are scary at the line-of-scrimmage. You’ve got 6’2” 265 lb. Jackson Jercinovic stepping into his senior shoes next to last season’s ‘Redshirt’ transfer David Schulte on the D-Line, the latter player an even larger lineman at 300 pounds. They’ll chew up opposing blockers, leaving space for Hylton, Dawson Litterall, and Cody Shaver to wreak mayhem. Behind those Thoroughbreds is a defensive backfield of kids like Harrison Ray, K’vian “Karl Anthony” Townsend-Flores, and the dynamic junior safety Lynnden McCoin.
Never fear – if the ‘26 Lancers offense is destined to be an RBI Hitter for a crushing defense, you’d still want them batting third or fifth, right next to Jack Clark. Shaver, already hailed as Missouri’s best rusher from scrimmage, takes short-field opportunities and turns them into touchdowns, having scored 32 times in a span of 14 games last year. Shaver has a set of complementary RBs that includes Brody Ervin, the senior-to-be who slung the Lancers on his back in the fourth quarter of 2025’s Caruthersville conquest. If opposing defenses cheat forward to resist Hill Valley’s beastly running game, burgeoning weapons like WRs Harrison Ray and Wyatt Harris will smite them with big catches. So will the TE Litterall, who is possibly the #1 receiving threat of SPX’s “Texas Roadhouse” strategy to be unveiled this year.
The Geek feels silly for telling folks, “Evan Eckrich came into his own in the Monroe City playoff game.” Thanks, Captain Obvious! The junior signal-caller can boast of having had one of the best underclass performances in county history in 2025’s state semifinals, throwing for 240 yards, and leading a final comeback drive for a TD which won over Monroe City’s radio broadcasters like Rocky in Moscow.
However, what The Geek has been trying to say is that Eckrich came into his own during the Monroe City victory, which is a more intriguing story. No. 4 didn’t look like more than a shaky small-school QB from an underdog team while Monroe City ran up an early 14-0 lead. It was in the incredible final 36:00 when SPX’s quarterback rose to stardom and put the MSHSAA community on notice.
The QB who can get subbed in the state quarterfinals, be bamboozled in the state semifinals, and still lead his squad to the Show-Me Bowl is more than just a play-action threat this fall. We’ll be rating Hill Valley’s new-and-improved passing game against tough defenses, who can fly to the ball, such as Gibson Southern, Farmington, and Vianney. But SPX boasts a junior QB who’s poised to take the gridiron feeling tuned-in like never before. Eckrich has a “Class 6” WR in the tall, nimble Ray, who’ll gobble 50-50 balls.
Shaver remains the Lancers’ ultimate RBI Hitter, and Missouri’s coaches have fooled around and given No. 40 added motivation to run for 3000 yards again. Shaver’s snub from 2025’s first and second-team All-State selections was naked politics. Here’s a rusher who could lead all Missouri running backs of the decade when all’s said and done, yet he isn’t good enough to be on the second string of your Class 2 All-State lineup? It’s JeffCo’s worst slap in the face from MSHSAA since Country Day was handed a “regulation win” for about 30:00 of a tight tilt at Hillsboro, and it’s pasted on SPX’s bulletin board.
Coach Ray has hinted to reporters that his team lacks depth, stating that a rash of injuries would derail the Lancers against Class 5 opponents such as the Farmington Black Knights. The Geek is aware that the St. Pius Lancers can’t practice like those teams – they don’t have a Scout Team that can pretend to keep up with Shaver’s first string. But it’s not as if 2026’s St. Pius roster is built on one superstar and a bunch of ham-and-eggers. The St. Pius X defense, especially, has a number of performers who could play the linchpin role for any given lineup, but who are part of an ensemble of equally fast, talented tacklers.
Class 3’s Bracket is Not for the Faint of Heart
Hill Valley’s new schedule looks daunting in two ways. The regular season begins and ends with crazy challenges vs Indiana, MSHSAA Classes 4 and 5, and yet another Week 9 scrum against the Olympic Athletes of Valle Catholic. The Class 3 playoff bracket, meanwhile, is studded with name-brand, private-campus powerhouses, such as Country Day and Lutheran North.
It’s not time to panic, and it’s also not time to label the Lancers steep underdogs in their first season by the highway. Lutheran North and Country Day weren’t demoted back to Class 3 by accident. They’re no longer the division-killers that they were. Lutheran North, competitively speaking, was like a bomb that blew up and left only rubble behind in the 2024-25 offseason. Besides, if the Lancers can muster up a strong playoff seed, they can advance while some of the big-shots are made to knock out each other.
St. Pius X prepared against Class 5-and-6 heavyweights in summer scrimmages, knowing that this regular -season slate and the Class 3 District postseason bracket alike are filled with opposing teams which Tri-City fans never thought we would see the Lancers compete with. SPX met St. Louis U. High in one scrimmage, and Timberland in another. They’ll cap it off with a Jamboree skirmish against Pattonville, an elite foe that can help the Lancers ready Week 1’s effort at Gibson Southern, and Week 7’s moon-shot against Farmington.
Could the 2026 Lancers earn an insane 3-1 (or better?) record against four MSHSAA Large Schools? Gosh, that would be almost as exciting as last year’s run to the state championship game … almost.
Photo Credit: St. Pius X Football