*** THIS IS THE FIRST in a series of 10 local sports stories The Dominion Post believes would make a good sports documentary. They will be posted online every Saturday and Tuesday through June 30.
MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — They are little more than simple football cliches now.
Phrases like “speed kills” or “getting our guys the ball in space” have become as commonplace in the game as helmets and cleats.
In the early 1990s of West Virginia high school football, they were still a somewhat novel idea.
That isn’t to say West Virginia prep football was caveman football, just still evolving.
DuPont High School won Class AAA state titles in 1992 and 1993 getting the ball on the outside to a young man you may have heard of named Randy Moss.
Liberty High School in Clarksburg had introduced the Run & Shoot offense to the state using Bryan Harman at quarterback. Harman went on to set school records at Fairmont State in college from 1998-2001.
Still, the general consensus was power football would win. There wasn’t a ton of room afforded to the smaller, faster players being thought of as impact players throughout the field.
There may have been even less room for the idea of the athletic quarterback, one who could run unscripted as well as throw the ball or the dual-purpose running back who could make plays catching the ball just as easily as running with it.
“If you kind of want to compare it to something, football in the state back then was basically everyone had the full house backfields or they went with the I-formation and two tight ends and tried to ram it down your throat,” said Lance Hoover, the quarterback who guided University High to the 1994 Class AAA state title game. “You basically look at how Bridgeport has built so much success through the years, well, that’s kind of how the game was played back then by just about everyone.”
In the end, it was exactly that style of team in South Charleston that finally did the Hawks in. The Black Eagles dominated the clock, had two running backs gain more than 100 yards and South Charleston attempted just two passes in picking up a 27-7 victory on that December day in Wheeling.
University High’s underdog run ended with an 11-3 record.
Building up to it
Coming off two consecutive 3-7 seasons, John Kelley did not have ram-it-down-your-throat type of players in 1994.
“Our nose guard was 170 pounds,” he said. “What we lacked in size, I believed we had the ability to make up for with our speed and athleticism. We did feel we had an overall pretty athletic team that year.”
Now, before we go any further, this is not to suggest that University High’s collection of undersized yet athletic players who made an underdog march to the championship game somehow thrust West Virginia prep football into the modern era.
It’s really hard to deny, though, that those Hawks don’t hold at least a small place in history by giving it a nudge in that direction.
“Honestly, I would like to think the biggest thing we changed was coaches in our state could begin to trust younger and faster guys,” said Hoover, who was named the Class AAA first-team all-state quarterback in 1994. “It wasn’t just about how many seniors you had or it wasn’t just about how big your offensive line was.
“You know, if you had a senior and a sophomore both playing the same position and if the sophomore was a little more athletic, I think coaches back then began to come around that it wasn’t just about playing seniors just because they were older or bigger.”
What the Hawks had was a 157-pound running back in Donny Quesenberry, not a bruiser, but equally talented in making guys miss at the line of scrimmage as well as catching passes out in the open field.
He was named the North Central Athletic Conference’s Player of the Year in 1994 and earned a first-team all-state nod as a utility player.
“He was a wide receiver and a running back,” Hoover said. “Look at the some of the top running backs in the NFL today. They do just as much damage catching passes as they do running the ball. That’s what Donny did for us 26 years ago.”
Brad Lamp was converted from the offensive line to tight end.
“That happened the summer before his senior year,” Hoover began the story. “We were at WVU’s camp and Brad was just making these unbelievable plays and going over top of guys to catch the ball.
“I went in to coach Kelley’s office and told him Brad couldn’t be an offensive lineman anymore.”
Lamp, too, earned first-team all-state honors as a linebacker.
And Hoover was the scrambler. No, he wouldn’t have done as well as an option quarterback, yet if there was an opening, Hoover wasn’t shy from turning a designed pass play into a running play.
“Lance had great instinct,” Kelley said. “We knew we had an athlete at quarterback and he could scramble and keep plays alive. You can’t cover guys forever and Lance took advantage of that.”
‘A little lucky’
This is 1994. There is no such thing as social media. The internet is still in its infancy.
And that is part of the Hawks’ story, because that Class AAA bracket couldn’t have broken any better for UHS.
As the No. 7 seed, the Hawks played at home in the first round and shut out Cabell Midland, 14-0.
They were supposed to travel to No. 2 Brooke the following week and have their season possibly end right there.
Except No. 15 Weir upset the Bruins and traveled to Morgantown and Hoover’s late-game heroics — more on that in a moment — propelled the Hawks into the semifinals.
In those semifinals, rather than facing No. 3 North Marion, which had beaten UHS by 17 points in the regular season, the Huskies had been upset by No. 6 Herbert Hoover.
“The most thankful part of the story to me is our guys didn’t have to hear about us being lucky,” Kelley said. “There weren’t really message boards for them to read. No one was tweeting about us being lucky. I didn’t really have to deal with those distractions, not like I would have to today if something like this happened again.”
Rather, Kelley was able to keep pushing his forum of how nobody outside of Morgantown believed in his players to keep them motivated.
“You look at any championship team and somewhere along the way there is a little bit of luck involved,” Hoover said. “Did we get lucky with how the other games played out? Probably, but we also had a very mature bunch of guys. Honestly, if there were the distractions back then of social media and everyone kept telling us we were just lucky, I really think we would have handled it very well. I don’t think it would have bothered us.”
Even the state title game against South Charleston was a bit of a surprise.
In the other semifinal, the No. 5 Black Eagles knocked off Moss and kept No. 1-ranked DuPont from going for a three-peat.
Even that comes with a story.
Kelley and assistant coach Bruce Clinton traveled to Charleston to watch that game.
To this day, Kelley believes the Hawks would have had a better chance at winning a state title if Moss and DuPont had won.
“It was simply a matter of matchups,” Kelley said. “We had trouble against big teams that just wanted to grind it out at you and that’s exactly what South Charleston did to DuPont.
“As great as Randy Moss was, you could look at that DuPont team and see some areas that could be exploited. Now, could we have beaten them? Maybe not, but I felt we matched up better with DuPont.”
Did Kelley’s players believe that theory?
“Honestly, we felt great that we didn’t have to play against Randy Moss, because he was Randy Moss,” Hoover said. “That’s what we thought then, because we didn’t know anything about South Charleston. We didn’t know how big and strong they were.
“Looking back on it now, maybe it would have been better if DuPont had won. Who really knows?”
The play
We end this story by jumping back a few weeks to that second-round victory against Weir.
The scene is set late in the fourth quarter, with the game tied at 14.
Hoover has just picked himself up off the Pony Lewis Field turf after getting sacked to set up a third-and-long at the UHS 23 with 59 seconds left.
“I don’t even remember the call,” Kelley said. “My thinking was let’s pick up a chunk on third down and then go for the rest on fourth.”
Hoover remembers Weir had blitzed the whole night sending three guys right at the UHS guard and center.
As he dropped back to pass, Hoover was immediately under pressure.
“I remember breaking one tackle and then spinning away from another guy,” Hoover said.
Hoover scrambled to his left and spun away from another defender.
“By that time, they were all expecting him to run with it,” Kelley said. “Their defensive backs had all started coming up. Their kids just made a mistake, but you see that happen a lot in the heat of the moment like that.”
Hoover instead lofted a pass to a wide open Sam Mancinotti for a game-winning 77-yard touchdown pass in the 20-14 victory.
“I remember thinking, ‘Please just catch it,’ ” Hoover said. “When you’re as wide open as Sam was, sometimes those can be the hardest catches to make.”
Mancinotti’s recollection, as told to The Dominion Post in 1994, “I saw Lance scrambling, and for a second, I thought the play was over. I can’t believe he broke free.”
Twenty-six years later the play still resides somewhere in the Hoover household. Years ago, he had the game film converted from VHS tape to a DVD.
Hoover can’t remember the last time he pulled it out and watched it. Probably been at least a few years, he said.
“I’m just glad that play didn’t become our defining moment,” Hoover said. “We went on to win the next week and played in the state championship.
“If we had lost the next week, then people could have said, ‘Well, you had one great play, but then you lost so it doesn’t mean as much.’ We kept winning, so it’s a good footnote in what was a magical season for us. I guess it was magical, because it’s 26 years later and you’re still asking me questions about it.”
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TIED TO HISTORY
RANDY MOSS (left) recovered well from losing in the 1994 semifinals. He finished fourth in the Heisman voting in 1997 at Marshall and went on to have a 13-year career in the NFL.
“You could watch him for one play back then and tell he was destined to be great at the next level,” Kelley said.
SINCE THAT 1994 state title game, only two teams seeded lower than No. 7 have reached the W. Va. Class AAA finals — No. 10 Riverside in 1999 and No. 8 Brooke in 2010. Both teams lost.
“The oddity of that 1994 game was neither school was supposed to be there,” Kelley said. “It was No. 5 vs. No. 7. You may never see anything like that again. Since then, it’s generally been teams in the top four playing each other.”
THE FOLLOWING YEAR a freshman by the name of J.R. House enrolled at Nitro and began his assault on state and national passing records. In the 1998 Class AAA state title game, House broke all the game’s passing records, some of which had been held by Hoover.
“I had the record for most attempts and completions and J.R. broke those in the first quarter,” Hoover said. “I went 11 of 19. By today’s standards, it’s crazy to think 11 completions was a record at one time. That just shows you how much the game has changed since then. J.R. was great. He had almost as many touchdown passes (10) in that game than I had completions.”
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