Originally published Oct. 12, 2020
MACHESNEY PARK — Who says public schools don’t recruit — or at least recruit defensively?
In 1993, Gabe Pena was in the process of transferring from Harlem to Boylan after his freshman year because the Huskies were not only the worst football school in the NIC-9, but the entire state.
The 1992 team had just completed its second straight 0-9 season under coach Gary Heifner. The school hadn’t won a game since 1988 — a streak of 38 straight losses under three different coaches.
“We lived down the street from (Boylan coach Bill) Thumm and he told my dad that I’d be welcome there,” said Pena, who now works at the Fiat Chrysler plant and lives in Rockton. “Harlem had a new coach coming and we hadn’t won in so long. But then we got a call from (Brian) Benning.”
The new coach was Brian Benning, who had coached Orangeville to the 1989 1A state title and taken the Broncos to the playoffs in four of the prior five seasons. He had taken the Harlem job in May of 1993, telling the Rockford Register Star’s Ed Glennon, “I want to try to do something people say I can’t do.”
“My mom was a Harlem grad, and she was the intense one in the house, and Brian sold her hard,” Pena remembers. “After the meeting, she said we were going to give him a chance.”
So Pena stayed and watched the Huskies go 0-9 in Benning’s first year, tying the state record for losses in a row at 47.
The Huskies had one last chance to snap the streak before owning the record outright. Harlem was opening the 1994 season against East, which was coming off a 1-8 season with its win being over Harlem.
So Pena stayed and watched the Huskies go 0-9 in Benning’s first year, tying the state record for losses in a row at 47.
The Huskies had one last chance to snap the streak before owning the record outright. Harlem was opening the 1994 season against East, which was coming off a 1-8 season with its win being over Harlem.
Mark Ritchie, a safety for Harlem, remembers the build up to that game was intense.
“It went on all summer, at 7-on-7s, camps,” Ritchie remembers. “Everyone was focusing on that game.”
Harlem snapped the streak with a 7-6 win in overtime in a game that was beautiful only to the winners. Harlem then lost the next eight.
“Once we snapped the streak, it really became hard to motivate the kids,” Benning said. “The feeling was they’d accomplished what they set out to do.”
“We played Boylan the next week and they beat us by 60 or something,” Ritchie remembered. “That brought us back to reality real quick.”
Harlem ended up scoring just 54 points and giving up 312. At the end of the school year, Benning approached Pena with an idea.
“He wanted to know if I could get Scott (Henderson) to come here,” Pena said. “Scott had played at Harlem in middle school, but he went to Lutheran and he was killing it there.”
Indeed, Henderson was the leading rusher on the 1993 Crusaders who made the playoffs for the first time since 1988. He followed that up with 1,315 yards rushing for Lutheran in 1994. It’s not a stretch to say he was the best Lutheran running back until a kid named James Robinson came along.
“I hadn’t talked to Scott in a couple of years, but I reached out and worked on him,” Pena said. “We went to a party that summer and a couple of Boylan guys told him he couldn’t play in the NIC-9.”
In the 1990s, high school football still centered around the run and Harlem had never been a great running team. If you look at the records compiled in the NIC-10 History Book (shameless plug), since 1977 when fullback Al Navickis helped power Harlem to its first conference title and playoff appearance, Harlem had exactly one running back finish in the top 10 in rushing in the conference in a season where all the schools played. Eric Newble was seventh in 1987 with 651 yards.
Luckily, Henderson was looking for a bigger challenge, but he was reluctant.
“All of my friends said ‘are you crazy’ when I said I was thinking about going to Harlem,” Henderson said.
Benning, though, sold him, too.
“He came to my house and it felt like we were after the same thing,” Henderson said. “He was a guy who had had success at a small school and wanted to prove to himself that he could do it at a bigger school. That’s what I wanted.”
Ritchie said the news Henderson was coming to Harlem sent a jolt through the team.
“We were psyched,” Ritchie said. “Then practice started, I was captain of the defense, and we couldn’t tackle him.”
“Getting Scott was big. He gave us a foundation to build around,” Benning said.
Still, Harlem had a tough opening stretch. They opened against Boylan, the defending NIC-9 champions and lost 46-19. Henderson showed the Titans he belonged by getting 96 yards on seven carries. Then the Huskies lost, 18-16, at home to Beloit (Wis.) Memorial, which was a perennial playoff team at the time. Henderson had all 16 points. He scored on screen plays of 65 yards and 75 yards and followed up both with two-point conversions.
At that point, Benning had one win in 20 games as Harlem’s coach and the next week Harlem was playing Belvidere, the two-time defending state champions, in Belvidere.
“There was a different feeling that week,” Henderson remembered. “Benning was friends with (Belvidere coach Vern Pottinger), but I think they were also were rivals. And (offensive coordinator Jim) Morrow was a Belvidere grad. He wanted to win that game badly.”
“Morrow was always a pretty energetic guy. That week he was running around the field like a crazy person,” Ritchie said.
Belvidere was 2-0 and ranked No. 5 in the state, largely on the strength of the back-to-back state titles. Ritchie said he could tell the coaching staff was confident.
“Maybe it was because of Morrow’s ties to Belvidere, but you could feel they had a good idea on how to attack Belvidere’s wishbone,” Ritchie said. “That week, we put in a whole new defense. Changed all of our calls.”
That Friday night, the Huskies blasted Belvidere, 28-6, a result so shocking that it remains hard to describe.
“There was no turning point really. We just beat them up,” remembered Ritchie, who is a manufacturing engineer at The Gleason Works and now lives in Belvidere.
Ritchie said the plan was to really attack the Bucs on plays to the outside and force them to run up the middle. In the first quarter, Ritchie knocked Belvidere’s starting quarterback out of the game with a hit that caused a fumble, which he recovered.
On offense, Pena and Henderson ran wild. Harlem rushed for 306 yards. Henderson had 175. Pena had 94.
“That was a big game for me, personally,” Henderson said. “My best friend at Lutheran, Steve Matzl, had transferred to Belvidere so we were playing each other. We started running, running, running and they couldn’t stop us.”
Benning said the win meant a lot as well because of the coach on the other sideline.
“Vern Pottinger is someone I really respected, as a coach and as a man,” Benning said of Pottinger, who compiled a 146-69 record at Belvidere over 20 years. “When Harlem offered me the job, I talked to a lot of people and he was one of the only ones, really the only one, who said Harlem ….. could be a good job. If he hadn’t said that, I don’t think I would have said yes.”
The win didn’t lead to a fairytale playoff run. Harlem won again the next week, evening its record to 2-2 and people publicly began to speculate about the playoffs.
“There were a lot of things going on in our school that year, and a few of our guys got suspended and then expelled,” Ritchie said. “They were all on our defense and after that, we couldn’t stop anyone.”
Harlem lost its final five games, but Henderson shined. He became the first running back in Harlem history to gain 1,000 yards (1,056 with another 244 receiving) and win the conference rushing title.
The Huskies went 2-7 again in 1996. Then in 1997, the program turned the corner, winning the conference and qualifying for the playoffs for the first time since 1977. Benning would lead Harlem to the playoffs again in 2001 and 2003 before leaving after that season to coach basketball in Dakota.
Morrow took over the program and led Harlem to the playoffs 13 times in 15 years. All anyone under the age of 40 knows about Harlem football is that it is a perennial winner. Ironically, this spring Morrow will be back at Belvidere as head coach. The Bucs have become almost as big of a turnaround project as Harlem was. Belvidere North opened in 2007, diluting the talent in Boone County. Belvidere has won just six games in the past five seasons.
Even though the change wasn’t immediate, all involved believe the seeds of Harlem’s long-term success were planted that day in Belvidere.
“It was validation of what we were trying to do,” said Benning, who lost a leg in a horrific car accident in 2011, retired from coaching in 2013 and has recovered sufficiently that he routinely shoots in the 70s in golf. “We started to get the multisport athletes to come out for football. They weren’t really interested before that game. They’d take football season off.”
“The stands at our next home game were packed,” said Henderson, who played at Rock Valley College for one year before going into the working world. He’s a supervisor now at Gunite, where he’s worked for 20 years. “You could see that the community really was hungry for success.”
