LAWRENCE TOWNSHIP, INDIANAPOLIS — Lawrence Central made the bold move of going out of state a year ago to hire John Rodenberg from the national powerhouse Cincinnati Moeller. They wanted to bring in someone that understood how to win. He’d already won three state titles so that box was checked. He led Covington Catholic in Kentucky to the state title in 2006 and then Cincinnati Moeller to titles in 2012 and 2013. Therefore, walking into the M.I.C. wouldn’t be a culture shock to his system by the time he got baptized. He posted a 4-7 record during his first year in the best conference in the state and he’s looking for the Beat to get much better in 2019.
His guys have adopted the motto “CHANGE.” According to Rodenberg “We want to change an attitude. We want to change the way we approach things. We want to change the way we prepare and we really want to learn how to develop that winning mindset and to do that we’ve got to change some bad habits.”
That’s a great motto to have especially with an inexperienced team. He goes on to say, “We lost so many players from last year’s team that we’re going to be really young. Our offensive line is really young. I think our defense will be strong. We’ll give our offense a little bit of time to get some experience but what I learned in the M.I.C., which I kinda knew it would be well coached. Tough games week in and week out but our guys are excited to play. ”
The Bears have 7 returning starters from a year ago. There have 5 on defense and 2 on offense. Rodenberg says,”Well we’ve really got three on offense because Jasen Graves, the transfer quarterback from Pike, is running the same exact offense he ran last year.”
Jasen transferred to LC when his dad, Jimmy Graves (former Pike head coach), came over as the offensive coordinator during the off-season. Graves is the league’s returning passing leader and that gives Lawrence Central an added boost with a young offense. He threw for more than 2,000 yards for the Red Devils a year ago. That should give the offense some confidence to start the season.
Rodenberg is excited about having a new offense with Coach Graves coming over. He says that “the offense that he brought over isn’t radically different than what I did before. I probably ran the ball a little bit more but um…they’re very similar in formation set. So that’s going to be helpful. With so many new guys playing it’s really been an easy learning transition for those guys. Especially for the quarterback because we moved our returning quarterback, John Lewis, to free safety and he didn’t have to learn a whole new jargon of an offense. So that’s really helped a lot.”
The Bears will be relying heavily seniors Graves, wide receiver Elijah Gaskin and running back Cortaveon Barnett on offense. On defense they’ll be looking for cats like free safety John Lewis, outside linebacker Daverin Rayner, linebacker Jaxson Schoenlien and outside linebacker Keymonie Allen.
