You may not know much about Lincoln, located in Benton County just north of Warsaw. But last year their football, basketball, and baseball teams combined to go 59 and 9 with the baseball Cardinals making it all the way to the state semifinals. And it's the football program that's had the most unlikely success.
Named after our nation's 16th president, Lincoln, Missouri didn't reach a population of over a thousand until the turn of the century…And it has the typical small-town fixtures. There's a drive-in, a Dollar General store, convenience stores, yoga. Yoga? Well, maybe this isn't a typical small town after all. Especially when it comes to the success of their Cardinals. And everywhere you look there's Cardinal pride.
And they start 'em young. As you notice in the football locker room, there's one word that stands out. "Family" is on several signs on the wall. And this family has fun from their mullets to the non-sensical defensive signals they bark-out.
"Rick Flair, Rick Flair," yells one player.
"Ricky Bobby-O" yells another.
"Let's go Jobi-Wan-Kenobi!" adds another.
"We want 'em to talk on defense so they just randomly yell out certain things that don't mean anything," explained assistant coach Michael Schnakenberg. "They're trying to distract the offensive players and the JV gets flustered because they don't know what's going on."
A lot of things will confuse you here. A small Class 1 team with a state-of-the-art artificial turf football field almost didn't have a football team to play on it. Started just eight years-ago, the program struggled. They went 0 and 19 in 2010 and 11 and had so many players drop out that in 2012 and 13 they dropped to 8-man football with an 11-man JV team.
"That's something you don't want to have to do as a coach," recalls head coach Danny Morrison. "For me it was scary because we wondered if we were ever gonna come back. We have this field here that's not painted for 8-man lines. So a lot of that kinda put me in a dark moment for a while."
"It was definitely a little frustrating our freshman year," adds linebacker Connor Spunaugle. "But it was just more of a learning process."
And learn they did. Lincoln returned to 11-man football in 2014 going 5-5, but last year they went undefeated during the regular season, finishing 11 and 1 with their only loss coming to Skyline in the district finals.
And with their offense scoring in the 40's, 50's, and 60's, the high-flying schemes they'd learned for 8-man football kept right on going in the 11-man game.
" Eight-man we had so many high-scoring games I remember we had a game where it was 98-points or something," quarterback Boone Kronke said. "It's insane. Spread the offense, throw the ball, run the ball, just to crazy stuff."
And it's crazy to think that a team with part-time assistant coaches that work at a bank and the soil and water district..have turned a near-extinct program into a powerhouse in just 2-years.
"It's well-worth the sleepless nights and the long days," explains part-time assistant Jamie Henderson.
With a thriving youth program, Lincoln's football future is very promising..But it was these juniors and seniors who will always be remembered as the ones who paved the way.
"We've kinda started a little tradition," Boone Kronke said.
"Whenever you come into a program you want to leave it a little better than it was when you came into it," adds Spunaugle.
"They came into it in the hardest of times and stuck through it," Morrison said of his juniors and seniors who've been around since the eight-man-days. "And that's what kept our program going. Hats-off to them for pushing through those tough years."
