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By Rick Cassano
Nick Yordy is sure that his Badin High School football team’s recent success against Fenwick won’t mean much Friday night.
The Rams have won the last six meetings in the series by a combined 194-41 score and will head north to Middletown to face the Falcons in a Greater Catholic League Coed Division clash.
“Maybe we’ve changed the tide a little bit,” said Yordy, noting that Fenwick won six straight games in the series before Badin’s current streak. “But it’s a GCL game, and it’s always got a little bit more fire to it playing them. Last year we came out of the gate playing really well, but those guys are gone. Now it’s these guys’ turn to see what they can do.”
BHS won 41-13 last season to increase its series lead to 23-9. Badin is 5-1 overall and 1-0 in the GCLC after beating Dayton Chaminade Julienne 34-7 last week, while Fenwick is 3-3 and 0-1 and coming off a 33-20 loss to Kettering Alter.
Friday will be homecoming for Fred Cranford’s Falcons at Yeager Field.
“I think Freddy is a really good coach and a great guy,” Yordy said. “A lot of us are friends outside of the football field. I’m sure he’s going to have those guys fired up. Every time we play these guys, it never goes the way you want it to go necessarily. You can kind of see them starting to change the program and get better.”
This is Year 3 for Cranford in his second stint as Fenwick’s head coach. He directed the Falcons from 2006-12 before returning in 2024.
Cranford, a 1992 Fenwick graduate who won a Division II state championship at Loveland in 2013, has a 49-49 record at his alma mater. The Falcons went 3-7 in 2024 and 6-5 in 2025.
“We’re definitely continuing to build in the right direction,” Cranford said. “The mentality is clearly a lot different in what we expect. Consistency has been a big part of that, just the way we practice and do things on and off the field. The kids are more aware of things we need to do to get better.”
Fenwick took a 28-26 loss to Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy in Week 1 and a 28-27 defeat at the hands of Edgewood in Week 4. The Falcons were that close to a 5-0 start. And they led Alter 7-6 heading toward halftime.
Cranford believes his squad is ready to seriously compete in the GCL Coed. But competing and winning are two different things.
“Sometimes it’s all between your ears,” Cranford said. “I think we’re where we need to be in the GCL. We’ve got a good football team. But when you play GCL football, it comes down to simple goals to win the game. You’ve got to take care of the football, which takes care of the clock, and you’ve got to line up right and tackle. When you look at our goals across the board, our grandmother could identify the games that we won and the games that we didn’t.
“We’ve done things the last couple years. You talk brick by brick, brick by brick … well, we’re there. We’ve got to kind of push that aside. The culture’s been created. Now we’ve got to find a way to start winning games.”
Division V Fenwick is the only GCL Coed school playing below D-III in football, and the Falcons face a schedule of mostly D-II and D-III opponents. That makes them a well-seasoned squad come playoff time, but they have to get there first.
“You’ve got to find a way to get through Weeks 1 through 10,” Cranford said. “If you don’t, the rest is irrelevant.”
Cranford said Fenwick is slowly growing school-wise and on the football field. He said the current administration is determined to make improvements on and off the field that should attract even more student-athletes.
“Numbers are a big deal. It takes a village of the right people here to generate those kids coming back to Fenwick,” Cranford said. “We’ve been on this campus for 22 years now. You’ve got to make sure your facilities are first class. If you don’t have it, find a way to get it.
“I’m not going anywhere. Hopefully I’m here long enough to see all of this come to fruition where we have what we need to win at this level. I know it can be done here because I’ve seen it.”
Edgewood and Badin are the two D-II teams on the Falcons’ schedule this year. Cranford said the Rams have built something and continue to add to their tradition, and that doesn’t just happen.
Cranford said the Fenwick faithful can expect Badin to bring toughness and a penchant for execution Friday.
“It’s kind of who you hang out with,” the Falcons coach said. “They get after it probably because of the aggressions of their coaches. They just do things right, and when you’ve been winning, you expect to do things right and you carry a little bit more confident swagger. It’s going to take a win over a team like Badin to where the Falcons can start building that kind of confidence.”
The Rams shook off the sting of a 27-14 loss to La Salle and took care of CJ in relatively easy fashion as junior running back Chase Even ran the ball 12 times for 129 yards and three touchdowns. Even is the GCLC’s leading rusher with 706 yards and nine TDs on 98 carries.
Badin has outscored its opponents 200-74.
“We didn’t let the loss to La Salle get to us,” said L.T. King, a senior slot receiver for the Rams. “The morale was good. It was not a problem. We came out hot against CJ, scored on the first two drives and just kept at it the whole game.
“You’ve got to get better and better, but I don’t think there’s anything specifically that needs to be fixed. We’ve just got to keep doing what we’ve got to do.”
King said he doesn’t feel any animosity toward Fenwick and used to play baseball with senior running back-strong safety Hudson Kreke, arguably the Falcons’ top all-around player.
“They’ve got some dudes,” King said. “I don’t have any personal beef with them, but being a GCL Coed team, it always means something more. So I want to put it to them.”
Fenwick runs a Wing-T offense directed by junior quarterback McCaffrey Halcomb. He’s completed 41-of-64 passes for 630 yards and nine touchdowns with two interceptions.
Halcomb missed the second half of the Alter game with an arm issue, with sophomore Stephen Berning leading two touchdown drives after the break. Cranford said Halcomb is good to go this week.
“We’re fortunate enough that we’ve got a really smart, athletic sophomore quarterback,” Cranford said. “He went in there baptism under fire and orchestrated our offense. That’s positive moving forward because I don’t think the kids were expecting that kind of adversity.”
Senior fullback Micah O’Connor (69 carries, 421 yards, five TDs) tops the Falcons on the ground. Senior D.J. Berning (50 carries, 370 yards, five TDs), Kreke (29 carries, 285 yards, five TDs) and Halcomb (41 carries, 175 yards, one TD) are described by Cranford as a four-headed monster in the ground attack.
In addition, Fenwick uses a lot of formations in an effort to make things as difficult as possible for opposing defenses.
“I think they’re executing at a high level,” Yordy said. “You have to play assignment football. You’ve got to be lined up correctly. If not, you’re going to get gashed.”
Neither team is huge up front. Yordy said Badin is outsized every week and this week is no different, though he pointed out that this may be the closest the Rams will get in terms of matching up size-wise on the line.
“We don’t have big kids, but we play hard,” Cranford said. “Having big guys up front can be counterintuitive in a weird way in the Wing-T. You don’t want guys that pop up like Pop-Tarts and can’t move.”
The Falcons’ 4-2-5 defense includes O’Connor and senior Cullin Shaffer at linebacker and junior Carrson Franklin, a transfer from Alter, coming off the edge. Cornerback D.J. Berning and Kreke are standouts as well, and senior safety Preston Yager is the leading tackler.
“Preston’s got an aggressive nose to the ball and plays downhill,” Cranford said. “But I understand that having your safety leading you in tackles is not always a good thing.”
He said Fenwick needs to control the ball and keep Badin’s offense off the field.
“Our best defense is our offense Friday,” Cranford said. “When our defense is out there, we’ve got to keep everything in front of us. We’ve got to be better open-field tacklers. We’ve got to play more consistent assignment football.”
That defense will have to deal with King, a big-play guy in the slot who’s helping out more in the backfield now that junior Chace Blanton has been sidelined for the rest of the season with an injury.
King has carried the ball eight times for 186 yards – that’s a 23.3-yard average – and two touchdowns. He’s also caught 10 balls for 158 yards and two TDs.
King grew up as a running back and played that position as a freshman, so giving Even some breathers in the backfield is not a foreign concept to him.
“As a running back, you’re expected to take some hits and that’s the big thing for me, preparing my body right,” King said. “At receiver, it’s more of a mellow kind of thing, just control what you can control. When you’re a running back, you get the ball and you’ve got to go after people.”
He’s got speed and more power than you might think at 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds.
“When Blanton got hurt, L.T. was the next guy we thought of putting back there,” Yordy said. “It’s a matter of keeping guys fresh and healthy for the next couple weeks, and L.T. is telling us he likes being back there. The kid has worked his butt off to get where he is. I don’t know if he just catches people off guard, but he’s pretty fast and strong.”
King attended Hamilton schools when he was younger, moving to St. Joseph for two years and then to Queen of Peace for two years.
He missed about half of the 2025 season after suffering a hip injury in the opener against Hamilton. King said it was an avulsion fracture with a tendon pulling away from a bone. He didn’t require surgery and said he’s had no lingering effects this year.
Asked to describe himself as a player, King said simply, “Playmaker is a great word.”
King has already verbally committed to play NCAA Division II football at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan and plans to major in business. He said he had some D-I interest, “but I went to Saginaw for my visit and I just knew it was home.”
“The recruiting process has been slow for me because I missed most of my junior year, which is very important,” King said. “But I did really well at summer camps and an opportunity came along. The Saginaw coaches made me feel at home. They wanted me as a player, not just a number. They also had top-of-the-line facilities. It was everything I could ask for.”
King said he was recruited as a receiver, but the SVSU coaches have indicated they want to use him as much as they can, so he could play anywhere.
Badin will return home next Friday to play Dayton Carroll for homecoming. The Falcons will be at home against CJ in Week 8.
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