Blog series features Trine's Eric Watt

The early-life years of Trine University football great Eric Watt is a major storyline in an extensive multipart blog series designed to highlight small-high school and small-college football in Indiana. 

Watt’s childhood years in Kentland, Indiana, and his time at South Newton High School and Tri-State/Trine University will be explored in the series, written in a rare, parallel-timeline study of two quarterbacks who were in the same class year but attended small high schools and colleges at opposite ends of Indiana, traveling divergent football paths in pursuit of team success and individual excellence.

The series, titled "On Hoosier Gridirons," launched at the blog Photo Potpourri (photopotpourri.blogspot.com), with an introduction today, Aug. 1. Sixteen chapters will follow, posted at the rate of one per day. The chapters will be followed by an “Epilogue” that will report on where all the central characters are today. 

Eric Watt took over as South Newton’s starting quarterback in 2004, his sophomore season, although his Rebels teams did not enjoy success until his junior and season seasons. In 2006, the Rebels went undefeated during the regular season, won the Midwest Conference championship and the school’s first-ever IHSAA Class A postseason regional championship. The Rebels that year also made their first (and only) appearance in the semi-state round of the IHSAA tournament. Watt and five teammates were named to the 2006 Midwest All-Conference team, including longtime friend Andy Rodriguez. Watt still holds all of the most important passing records for a game, season and career at South Newton.

After high school, Watt and Rodriguez attended Tri-State University, where Watt was inserted into the starting lineup permanently midway through his freshman year. He led the Thunder (which became Trine University in his sophomore year) to three consecutive Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association championships (2008, ’09, ’10) and three consecutive appearances in the NCAA Division III postseason tournament (same years). In two of those seasons (2008, ’10), the Thunder made it through the regular season undefeated.

Watt was named quarterback of the MIAA All-Conference Offense in 2008, ’09 and ’10 and was the league’s Most Valuable Offensive Player in 2009 and ’10. He was inducted into Trine’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 2016 and named to the university’s All Quarter-Century Team in 2019.

Watt and Kyle Ray, a member of the Indian Creek High School (Trafalgar, Ind.) Class of 2007 and whose life narrative constitutes the other parallel storyline in "On Hoosier Gridirons," never faced each other in their high school playing years. But they did meet in starting roles opposite each other in 2009, their junior years of college, for a non-conference game at Franklin College. Both schools were emerging Indiana small-college football powers at the time.

Despite divergent football paths, Watt and Ray enjoyed outstanding 2010 seasons and were finalists for that year’s Gagliardi Trophy, NCAA Division III’s annual award given to the year’s most outstanding football player. The Gagliardi is D3's equivalent to Division 1's better-known Heisman Trophy.

Trine’s Watt was the eventual winner of the Gagliardi, and he remains the only Gagliardi winner from an Indiana college or university.

The blog series will cover Watt’s childhood and high school years in Chapters 1, 2 and 3, with the same period of Ray’s life covered in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Watt’s first two years of college and first two games of 2009 are covered in Chapters 8 and 9; Ray’s first two years of college and first two games of 2009 will be featured in Chapters 10 and 11. Chapter 12 will be devoted entirely to the 2009 game when Watt and Ray finally meet in the starting lineups on the gridiron. Chapters 13, 14 and 15 review the remaining college years of both quarterbacks, and Chapter 16 looks closely at the Gagliardi Trophy process and how Watt and Ray’s schools handled publicity about their athlete’s nomination for the award.

Joe Konz, the author of “On Hoosier Gridirons” and the face behind the blog, attended and photographed the Franklin-Trine game on Sept. 26, 2009. The contest’s dramatic outcome was decided by a single point and featured a 13-point rally late in the second half, thanks in part to the heroics of  another Franklin College quarterback, Nick Purichia, whose early-years story is presented in Chapter 7 of the series.

Konz is a retired, longtime newspaperman and a longtime photography hobbyist. He spent the final 33½ years of his journalism career in various assignments in the newsroom of The Indianapolis Star, the largest-circulated daily newspaper in Indiana. He retired as chief of the newspaper’s daytime copy desk.

Konz said the idea to develop “On Hoosier Gridirons” evolved from a seven-year personal photography project in the 2010s to visit small Indiana colleges and universities that had football programs, and to spend time at each school photographing a football game and making campus landscape pictures. He presented his best images from those intermittent visits at the time in Photo Potpourri blog posts, using the collective tag "game day." He made his visit to Trine University on Oct. 10, 2015, Homecoming weekend, in game the Thunder lost to Olivet College, 49-24.