Cornerstone goes from almost losing the football program to playing for a championship
Three years ago, a group of Topeka-area football players were on the verge of losing their opportunity to play the sport. This Saturday, they will be playing for a championship.
Participants in the local home-school alliance Cornerstone Family Schools learned at the close of the 2019 football season that they would no longer be able to play football for Topeka’s Cair Paravel Latin School (CPLS).
Cair Paravel was in the process of becoming full members of KSHSAA. Once that process was complete, it could no longer put home school students on the field.
Cornerstone Family Schools didn't give up on football
The options for Cornerstone students to continue playing football appeared limited. But where there’s a will, there’s a way.
On Saturday at Kansas Wesleyan University, those boys who were nearly forced to give up the sport will face the home school Manhattan Eagles for the Kansas Approved Schools Championship (KASC) — a four-team playoff of KSHSAA-approved eight-man programs who aren't eligible to participate in the organization’s state bracket for member schools.
This opportunity didn’t come easy.
“My son played on the CPLS team the year that we were told that the home school kids wouldn’t be allowed to play in the future,” said Cornerstone coach Kipp Van Camp. “We got about 10 families together at our house and said, ‘We’re thinking about a very large undertaking.’
“We had kids who still wanted to play. When I started asking the questions, I honestly didn’t think it would happen. Everyone thought that it was expensive, and the undertaking was bigger than we ever dreamt.”
Counseled on what would be required to start a football team by the founder of the Manhattan Eagles, Van Camp presented a list of hurdles to parents.
The first thing I said was, ‘You have to have 14 to 16 kids to start,” Van Camp said. “If you don’t have that core group, even if you get everything else lined up, you don’t have enough kids for a team.
“The next thing was, ‘How are you going to pay for it?’”
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Van Camp said getting a team off the ground required about $32,000, with operational costs of about $15,000 each year after that. He said an anonymous donor jump started the program with $10,000.
“If we hadn’t had that donation, we couldn’t have ever done this. Or at the least we would have looked like the Bad News Bears showing up out there,” Van Camp said. “The next thing was, ‘Where are we going to practice?’”
Van Camp said every effort to secure a practice field in Topeka failed.
“So finally, I said, ‘Well, in the front of our house, we have a couple of acres of brome field. If no one minds, we can start there.’ So we did. We started practicing in our front yard,” Van Camp recalled. “The next question was the league. Will they accept us, this startup? I called the Kansas Christian Athletic Association that CPLS played in, and they said, ‘Yeah, if you’re crazy enough to think you can pull it off, go for it.’”
Cornerstone Family Schools is having its best year yet
And thus began the long road to a shot at a championship. The Saints went 3-6 in their first season, 2-6 in their second. This year, the Saints are 7-3, and last Friday, they surprised powerhouse St. Mary’s Academy in the KASC playoffs.
Cornerstone had been beaten by St. Mary’s 28-6 just two weeks earlier. To the Saints, their 36-28 upset of St. Mary’s was a landmark.
“They’re the big dog in the league,” Van Camp said. “They’re actually going up to 11-man football next year as a full member of KSHSAA. So to beat them was really huge. We really wanted to beat them because they’ve dominated the league. We wanted to be able to say we finally beat them.”
“Winning that game was amazing, said senior Gabe Culberth. “I can barely put into words how exciting it was. I’m still trying to believe it myself.”
The win pitted Cornerstone against the Manhattan home school association two weeks after the Saints lost to that team. Culberth said beating St. Mary’s gives the Saints confidence they can vanquish another foe.
“A lot of people thought we couldn’t (beat St. Mary’s). So when we did that, we believed, ‘OK, we can win this next game too,’” Culberth said.
Spearheading the Saints’ offense is senior quarterback Ethan Frank, who has thrown for 18 touchdowns and run for eight. Junior Caleb Edgerton leads the defense with 94 tackles.
Gabe Culberth leads the team with 569 yards from scrimmage and 16 total touchdowns. His twin brother, Eli, has contributed 323 yards and four more scores.
“It’s awesome playing with (my twin brother), being on the field and being in on plays together,” said Gabe Culberth, whose father is the Cornerstone athletic director.
“The amazing thing is that it’s all done on volunteer hours,” said the twins’ father, Drew Culberth. “The coaches are dads who want to see their kids have fun and play ball. Nobody gets paid or gets any kind of prestige from this.”
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An opportunity to compete
Offering home school students opportunities to compete is important to Cornerstone parents, Drew Culberth said.
“There are a lot of differences between being a home school athlete and one at a typical school,” the athletic director said. “We don’t practice every day. We can’t do that. Our students aren’t together every day. They form very strong bonds, but they don’t have that all-day bond you have in a school building.
“Home school families give their children as many, if not more, opportunities to be around other students as at a public school. We offer arts and music as well as athletics.”
Giving Cornerstone students a chance to play football has been a labor of love, said Van Camp, who noted that after the first high school season, the Saints added a middle school team.
“If someone had told me what we would be into six months into it, I would have said, ‘No way!’ But as it happened, day to day, you just took the list and worked off one more thing,” the head coach said. “The coolest thing now is how the whole organization has embraced it. We now have a bigger coaching staff than some public schools. We have six dads coaching. We show up now and we have this whole entourage of people.”
Van Camp said starting the first year with a core group of players trained in the CPLS system jump started the Cornerstone program.
“That experience at CPLS helped,” Van Camp said. “We got beat six times, but we only got mercy-ruled by a couple of teams that year. We were competitive against just about every team that first year except St. Marys.”
The Saints received a boost from another area private school in their first season.
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‘It just so happened that our first year, Veritas (Christian School in Lawrence) quit their football program,” Van Camp said. “We reached out to them, and that first year four or five kids from Veritas came over and joined us. So we actually had about 20 kids that first year. We had enough to practice against each other.”
Cornerstone plays its games at Bennett Field, the home field of Veritas, which has since resumed its football team.
Showing further resourcefulness, the Saints raise funds to support their football program.
“We started asking around what other schools had done for fundraisers,” Van Camp said. “One of the moms came up with a holiday pie fundraiser. So right after the end of the last season with CPLS, we had a ‘pie day’ where all the potential players showed up. We had all these crates and crates of apples, and we made frozen apple pies for the holidays. That first year we sold about 25 pies, and we were thinking we did well. Our goal this year is 370 pies. It’s a monstrosity. It’s grown into a beast.”
The Cornerstone players recognize the effort their parents and coaches have made.
“We do everything for God’s glory, so it’s awesome that we get to do this for Him,” Gabe Culberth said. “If it weren’t for (the people who built the program) we wouldn’t have this opportunity.
“We are really thankful for our coaches for all the hours and hours they put in. That’s one of the reasons why we’re successful this year, because of how amazing our coaches are.”
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: This Kansas homeschool football team to play for 8-man title
