Friday’s season-ending loss is going to sting for a while, but Owensboro head coach Jay Fallin said his football team will move forward and has plenty to be proud of after a largely successful year.
The ultimate goal would obviously be to bring home the state championship trophy after the final game of the year, but Fallin said that can’t be the only factor when looking back at the accomplishments of a team.
“Everybody wants to win a state championship, and the unfortunate reality is that for everybody but one, your season is going to end with a loss,” Fallin said. “While that’s never easy, we can’t measure our success of each individual team based on if we didn’t win a state championship, then that season is a failure. That’s ridiculous. We’ve been playing football at Owensboro High School since 1893 and we’ve only won four.”
Coming out of a relative down year in terms of wins and losses, Fallin said this group of seniors wanted to change the atmosphere that surrounded the program last season.
“I want to give a ton of credit to the seniors because there was a lot of negativity around from the periphery and outside the program,” he said. “They took that out and they worked and they won 10 ball games and beat Bowling Green. They did a lot of great things.”
This year’s senior class it the first group that spent all four seasons under the direction of Fallin, and it’s the third season they’ve had at least 10 wins — they won 35 total. Their undefeated run through district play also earned them a district championship in 2018.
The Red Devils won eight games in a row after starting 2-2, and their most notable win came in the second round of the state playoffs when they finally took down Bowling Green. It broke a 14-game losing streak to the Purples that dated back 10 years.
They beat Henderson County four times in a row for the first time since 1986, and won a share the city-county championship, so there’s no shortage of meaningful wins for the outgoing seniors
“They’re not a big group of seniors in terms of numbers, but they’re a great group of kids and they wanted to prove that last year was not reflective of them,” Fallin said. “I believe that they did that.”
Following the 44-7 loss to undefeated South Warren in the region championship Friday, Fallin said the team would take some time off to recover, but their returning players will regroup and start focusing on improving even more next year.
While no loss is particularly easy to accept, the Red Devils can take some solace in facing a Spartans team that is a favorite to win the state championship. It gives Owensboro a chance to see what they can do to get to the next level.
South Warren was in almost the exact same position a year ago, so Fallin knows it can be done. The Spartans lost 43-7 in the semifinals to eventual champion Covington Catholic.
“You see that they were a young team and they profited from that,” Fallin said. “They came back with the attitude and the vision and the knowledge of what it takes to be a state champion in 5A in the state of Kentucky. I think they’ve got as good a chance as anybody to do just that.”
Owensboro can follow the same blueprint next season in a hunt for a fifth championship for the school. Though a few key players will graduate, the Red Devils return a strong core that will be hungry to avenge this year’s loss.
For now though, Fallin wants to make sure his guys appreciate all their 2018 success.
“Wounds hurt when they’re fresh and this one’s going to hurt for a little while, but we’ll move forward,” he said. “When we do, we’ll have time to sit back and analyze it and celebrate the accomplishments of this team.”
