MSL Football Playoffs: When High School Postseason Drama Started on Wednesdays
Mid-Week Openers Were Part of Illinois Playoffs From 1974-93
The energy and enthusiasm in the voices of John Ayres, Dave Pendergast and Rich Roberts is like being transported back to a vastly different time of Illinois high school football.
You can envision Ayres getting his Conant team ready to play Larkin in 1980. Or Pendergast, his successor, prepping his team to meet York in 1993. Or Roberts doing the same for Buffalo Grove against neighboring rival Stevenson in 1991.
Getting ready to play today. For the first 20 years of the football playoffs, from 1974-93, the drama and excitement of the postseason started with Wednesday afternoon or Wednesday night football after the final weekend of the regular season.
“It was so much fun,” said Ayres, who led Conant to the Class 6A semifinals in the school’s first playoff trip in 1980.
“Those Wednesday games were so exciting,” said Roberts, who was the defensive coordinator for Grant Blaney’s 1986 state champion and 1978 state runner-up before taking over as head coach in 1990.
“It was fun,” said Pendergast, who was an assistant to Ayres before taking over in 1987. “When I get together with John (Ayres) and other coaches the Wednesday playoff game always comes up. You talk to younger coaches and they look at you like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
If you are a head coach stressed out right now, thinking you’re running out of time to get ready for your playoff opener, imagine an era where that time had now run out and it was game-time. Oh, and win the Wednesday game, and you had exactly two days to prep for your second-round game on Saturday. Obviously, safety reasons of playing three games in an eight- to nine-day span brought an end to the format.
“The craziness factor is what made it so enjoyable and memorable,” Pendergast said. “(The change) in a way was a good thing. Looking back it was really fun and crazy. Your adrenaline was kind of flowing for the whole week. You didn’t have any time to kick back and savor anything. It was all go, go, go.”
Pendergast, who was the Mid-Suburban League’s winningest coach at 115-74 when he retired in 2004, saw his first playoff qualifier in 1989 get an at-large berth at 6-3. The Cougars won their Wednesday opener in dramatic fashion 20-13 over Naperville Central on Rick Michael’s touchdown passes to Vic Pariso and Vaurice Patterson in the final 4½ minutes and they weren’t stopped until they reached the Class 6A semifinals at powerhouse East St. Louis (Senior).
Ayres’ first playoff qualifier needed to win only two games to make the semifinals in 1980. That was also the first year the playoffs were expanded from five classes and 80 teams to six and 96. So, you had to win a conference title or have a powerhouse team with an 8-1 record - and even that was no guarantee - to make the postseason.
Ayres had teams of 6-3 in 1977 and 7-2 in 1984 miss the playoffs. Fred Lussow’s 1982 Forest View team packed up its gear with an 8-1 record. The field would be doubled to 192 teams in 1985 and expanded into its current eight-class, 256-team format in 2001.
“To get in was quite an honor,” said Roberts, whose first team didn’t get an at-large berth with a 6-3 record.
“It was so good for the school and everybody was so excited,” said Ayres, who went 71-44 in 12 years as Conant’s head coach. “In the Mid-Suburban League you had to struggle to win the conference. The focus was on winning the conference and everything else was a bonus.
“Once you had that down, that week of two games was just exciting for everybody. It was hard on the coaches but at that time of year the kids just want to play.”
Trying to get your players ready for their playoff opponent was also a significant challenge for coaches beyond the shortened preparation time. There was no one like Joliet Herald-News sports editor Steve Soucie to basically have the pairings broken down on the internet well before they were announced live on statewide TV.
And there was no seeding system for the playoffs until 1994.
“We thought we were geniuses and sat down and looked at the map,” Pendergast said with a laugh of trying to plot out potential playoff opponents.
“It was a crapshoot,” said Roberts, who was 102-74 in 18 years as BG’s head coach. “(Longtime assistant) Steve Gibble, the mathematician he is, would have things kind of figured out. He’d say, ‘it could be one of these three teams or one of these four teams. Now guys have a really good, clear idea of who they’re going to play with all the seeding.”
Ayres recalled getting a phone call late on Saturday night that Conant would play Larkin in its 1980 playoff opener. That set up the next challenge of exchanging film - actual 8 millimeter or 16 millimeter film - to scout the upcoming opponent. Ayres said he was able to call Larkin coach Ray Haley, whose team had gone to the semifinals a year earlier, that same evening.
Haley told Ayres he might be able to do a film exchange Sunday afternoon after he went to church and then to lunch with his coaches.
“It was so funny,” Ayres laughed. “He was used to it and we weren’t.”
In those days, Ayres’ wife Lana, who was Conant’s longtime athletic department secretary, filmed the games and would take the film to the Holiday Inn in Rolling Meadows. The film developer would get it and John Ayres would drive to Batavia to pick it up the next morning.
Pendergast lived in Chicago and many teams at that time used a place called Cinema Processors on Grand Avenue near the loop. Sometimes he would run into people under much tighter deadlines to get their film developed for more than just some teenage football players.
“At one time they did the film for all the news channels,” Pendergast said. “You’d see guys running in there with CBS and NBC.”
Roberts recalled that a few years after the playoffs started the MSL had an unwritten agreement against coaches giving film to a school that was playing another league school. He also said BG felt it had a couple of advantages that included being the last team in the league to install lights on its home field in 2004.
“If we played at home we didn’t have lights, so we played right away, and if we won we would scout that opponent later that night to get ready for the following Saturday,” Roberts said. “And we felt we had such an advantage since we were completely two-platoon.”
The quick turnaround, the excitement of being part of such an exclusive group and the chance for students to get out of school early seemed to create a different kind of buzz for the Wednesday games.
“The fun thing about the Wednesday game, especially if you played in the afternoon, you’d have a half day of school and usually you’d have pretty darn good crowds for the games,” Pendergast said. “It was usually a real fun atmosphere.”
“The whole school was excited and I don’t know how the teachers got anything done,” Ayres said with a laugh. “For the kids, the school, it was so exciting. Our first year in the playoffs the school went nuts.”
Roberts’ first playoff win as a head coach was a dramatic 14-12 win over Stevenson in 1991 that was decided on a missed field goal on the final play.
“You would play that last (regular-season) game, usually a Saturday game, and those Wednesday games were so exciting,” Roberts said. “Those were exciting times.”
Great article as always Marty. I remember those days when I was an assistant coach for Samojedny. It was fan and stressful all at the same time. To look back on it now it was crazy what we & the kids did. I remember during some of those times Lew Miskowicz and I would sleep out in his camper in the school parking lot since we both lived so far from Fremd.
Thanks for writing the story.
I played on Wheeling's first ever state appearance in 1985 vs. Forest View on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. Dan O'Conor, Greg Anderson and Matt Witt led us to an 8-1 record. Unfortunately, Forest View was 8-1 as well and pounded us 37-14. I think we would have gone far if the current playoff system was in use. Oh well, those were the good old days.