Forsyth is an hour south of Crane, and on a Monday night, that didn’t seem to matter. The bleachers were filled with Crane fans, and plenty of them had no son, grandson or neighbor kid to point to on the field. They drove down to watch a Crane team play football, because for more than 70 years, there hadn’t been one.
The Crane High School junior varsity football team opened its inaugural season Aug. 31, falling 44-34 to the Forsyth Panthers in a game the Pirates played almost entirely without a bench. Crane carries 13 players, and an injured player left one of them out Monday. That put 12 in uniform for an 11-man game. When Brandon Hodges went down with an injury early on, the remaining 11 played every snap on both sides of the ball with no substitutes.
The Pirates came out strong anyway. Clay Cypret and quarterback Maddox Vaught each recovered a Forsyth fumble in the opening quarter, and Vaught punched in a two-yard run for the first touchdown scored by a Crane High School football team since the early 1950s. The two-point try to Jayden Lewis was no good, and Crane led 6-0 after one.
Forsyth answered in the second, but Crane kept swinging. Vaught dropped a Panther ball carrier for a seven-yard loss on a sack, then hit Jax Glossip on a 30-yard touchdown pass and ran in the two-point conversion himself. The Pirates went to the half down 22-14.
Crane kept fighting in the second half of the game when Vaught connected with Colby Tracy on a 20-yard touchdown pass, then found Lewis from two yards out and hit him again on the conversion. With five minutes to play, the Pirates trailed by two, 30-28.
Then came the break that ended it all. Forsyth’s ensuing kick traveled about 11 yards - just past the 10 required for the kicking team to recover - and took a wild bounce back toward the Panthers. Forsyth took the opportunity to score again, putting the game away - then declined to attempt the extra point, a gesture of sportsmanship with the outcome already decided. Vaught ran in one more time from a yard out as the game came to a close.
The program’s return is largely thanks to the work of Luke Vaught, who founded Crane Youth Sports in 2023 with a K-6 football program. As those players moved up, Crane Youth Sports reached an agreement with the Crane R-III School Board for the district to once again host football as a school sport, with Crane Youth Sports providing the financial backing through its year-round fundraising.
Crane fielded a junior high team for the first time last year and added the high school JV team this season.
The roster reflects how new the program is. Crane has no seniors, three juniors, three sophomores, and more than half the team - seven players - are freshmen.
The Pirates are led by head coach Chane Hutton, with assistant coaches Mike Morelock, Andrew Asher, and Anthony Daniels.
Crane returns to the gridiron Tuesday, Sept. 8, at Pleasant Hope, where it will face the Pleasant Hope/Halfway/Marion C. Early cooperative - three small schools that combine to field one team, an arrangement common among Missouri districts without the enrollment to go it alone.
