Sitting at a McDonald’s in Topeka, an enthusiastic Dale Burkholder grabs a pen and a piece of paper and diagrams the play.
Thirty-four years have passed, but the former Wichita North High School football coach and current Berryton, Kan., resident says his memories of Barry Sanders turning the corner on a reverse remain vivid.
“I can see it like it was yesterday. There he was, No. 3,” Burkholder said as he put pen to paper. “We’d pull the guard and boom. If the defense flowed at all with the play, then that was it.”
The nostalgia the now-retired Burkholder feels toward that 1985 season is understandable. Sanders’ senior year at Wichita North was the launching pad for his iconic playing career and the start of a friendship between a player and coach that has withstood decades.
Sanders earned All-State honors, eclipsed Wichita’s 10-year-old rushing record and nabbed a Division I scholarship from Oklahoma State before parlaying his success into a Heisman Trophy award, four NFL rushing titles, and an induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In 2011, The Wichita Eagle ranked Sanders as the greatest athlete in Kansas history.
Anyone who says they saw Sanders’ success coming is probably lying, however. He entered his senior year for the Redskins with no scholarship offers and a reputation for being too small and too timid to play running back.
Before Sanders electrified Oklahoma State fans en route to winning the Heisman in 1988 and long before he was named to 10 consecutive Pro Bowls with the Detroit Lions, he had to prove to his high school coaching staff that he was worthy of being the offense’s focal point.
This is the story of how a relatively unknown player, who didn’t even show up for the first day of practice, took over as the starting running back in the fourth game of the season, seized the opportunity and then went on to become one of the greatest players in pro football history. It’s exactly the kind of screenplay that would be rejected for not being believable.
“Before the season, nobody had him on their list,” Burkholder said. “If he hadn’t moved to running back, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation. It shows you that kids can get lost in the shuffle.”
A no show
Every season brings a renewed sense of optimism. For Burkholder, the 1985 season was particularly special. It was his first season as head coach of Class 6A’s Wichita North after previously coaching such smaller Kansas schools as Buhler, Marysville, and Independence.
“It was a move up,” he said. “Coaches have that urge to climb.
“Everyone was pumped. Everyone gets excited about the first day.”
But the first practice arrived, and Burkholder’s future Hall of Famer was a no show. The second practice later that day? Still, no Sanders.
“I didn’t know what to think,” Burkholder said. “I was skeptical. I wondered if this kid was going to work out. If you miss the first practice … Who misses the first day of practice?
“As a coach, that made me really angry. Everybody comes the first day. Why wasn’t he there?”
When the second set of two-a-day practices arrived, Sanders explained his absence.
“He comes up to me the second day, and I wasn’t happy,” Burkholder said. “He said, ‘Coach, my dad made me help him work on a roof yesterday. Now, I’m yours.’”
Despite the excuse, the new coach knew he needed to make an example of Sanders. After practice, Burkholder told Sanders to do “bear walks,” a drill in which players crawl on all fours, for the length of the football field.
“I made him go 100 yards down and 100 yards back,” Burkholder said. “I told him to keep going until I said to stop. He didn’t complain a bit. From then on, all of his teammates called them ‘Barry walks.’”
A hill to climb
Wichita North’s starting running back in 1984 was Barry’s older brother, Byron Sanders, who went on to play at Northwestern University.
However, Barry was not the assumed replacement in 1985. Listed at what a teammate described as an “inflated” 5-foot-8 and 170 pounds in The Wichita Eagle’s season preview article, Sanders didn’t possess the size of your prototypical I-back.
Bob Shepler, the longtime Wichita North coach, left his post after the 1984 season to become the school’s athletics director but apparently remained vocal about his choice at starting running back.
“Shepler thought I was too small for the position and told the coach not to put me at tailback,” Sanders wrote in his 2003 book “Barry Sanders: Now You See Him …”
“He also had another complaint about me -- he thought I lacked ‘contact courage,’ meaning I was afraid of being hit, afraid to run directly into the line or into a defender. Two other coaches on the staff said that Shepler mentioned to them that I had a yellow streak up my back.”
Burkholder declined to call out anyone by name but did admit that he was told by other coaches that Sanders “shied away from sticking it up in there.”
“None of those former coaches pegged him as being the ‘guy,’” Burkholder said.
So the Redskins opened the season with junior Orlando Parker at running back, and Sanders at wingback, defensive back and kick returner.
“I don’t think anyone knew what we had in Barry, because we just hadn’t seen him at running back before,” said Todd Reeves, an offensive lineman on the 1985 Redskins and a current Topeka resident.
While Parker took the starting running back position, Sanders grabbed the headlines in Wichita North’s 27-8 season-opening win over Wichita West. Sanders made the most of his limited role at wingback, rushing for 156 yards and three touchdowns on five carries while catching three passes for 62 yards and a touchdown.
“One North offensive gun that did not sputter was wingback Barry Sanders,” wrote The Eagle’s Bill McKay in his Sept. 14, 1985 article with the headline “Redskins wallop Pioneers: Sanders scores four touchdowns.”
“(Sanders) scored all four Redskins touchdowns, three of them on dramatic plays, accounting for 218 yards of offense.”
It was the kind of performance that got Burkholder wondering if he was taking full advantage of Sanders’ abilities.
“I said to the assistant coaches, ‘Guys, are we sure we have the right guy at I-back?’”
The Redskins stuck to the plan for the next two games -- a 9-0 loss to Bishop Carroll and a 23-9 defeat to Wichita Southeast.
In the latter game, Parker was limited to 39 rushing yards on 15 carries, while Sanders ran for 78 yards on five carries. Parker also fumbled in the third quarter, setting up a Southeast touchdown that broke a 9-9 tie.
Ironically, it was Parker’s decision to reverse field in that game that prompted Burkholder to make the move to Sanders, who went on to make reversing field his signature move.
“When Parker reversed field, that was it,” Burkholder said.
“Isn’t that something though? I replaced him with the guy most known for changing direction.”
No matter the reason, Sanders’ opportunity had finally arrived.
‘Who is this guy?’
In 1985, Kirk Seminoff was a 19-year-old sophomore at Wichita State University who was hired to cover city league games and compile statistics for The Eagle.
He wasn’t expecting to witness history when he was assigned to cover 0-3 Wichita South against 1-2 Wichita North in the fourth game of the season. And he certainly didn’t recognize the significance of being tasked with covering Sanders’ first start at running back.
“Entering the season, he was just another returning starter,” said Seminoff, who went on to become sports editor at The Eagle and now works as the associate editor for the Wichita Business Journal. “He was thought of more as a defensive back.”
Sanders’ week 4 performance erased that perception.
The speedster ran for 274 yards and scored four touchdowns -- three rushing and one receiving -- in a 29-19 victory.
“It’s safe to say that Barry Sanders has adjusted well in moving from wingback to tailback,” Seminoff wrote in the Oct. 5, 1985 article. “All the North High senior did in his first game as tailback was rush for 274 yards and score four touchdowns.”
Sanders’ brilliance was on full display. His first touchdown came on a 49-yard sweep in which he eluded several defenders.
“He was so fast to the corner and then down the sideline,” Seminoff said. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’”
Sanders later added a 17-yard touchdown reception from quarterback Mike Mason and second-half touchdown runs of 24 and 35 yards to seal the victory.
After the game, the newly discovered star remained modest.
“I knew the plays, so it wasn’t that big of a change,” Sanders said. “If my line blocked, I knew I could get a lot of yards. They blocked really well.”
Meanwhile, Burkholder knew his team possessed a special talent.
“I’ll tell you, Barry Sanders was outstanding,” Burkholder told Seminoff. “He’s a very smart football player.”
It didn’t take long for the whole team to recognize what they had.
“Everybody was looking at each other like, ‘Wow,’” Reeves said. ‘“We really got something here. This is going to be awesome.’”
Tale of the tape
Now with Sanders as the featured weapon on offense, watching game film evolved into a weekly high-five session for Wichita North coaches and players.
“We wore out that film,” Burkholder said. “We couldn’t wait to watch the game and see what he did. Everybody would get excited watching those plays and seeing him make another defender miss. We’d watch some of those players over and over. We were his biggest fans.
“He would do things I had never seen before. It’d be like, ‘How’d he do that?’ He was like Super Man out there.”
Reeves said the weekly film session allowed teammates to fully appreciate Sanders’ talents.
“The film sessions, especially when we won, were a lot of fun,” he said. “There would be a lot of whooping and hollering. Since I was playing in the games, there’d always be things that I would miss.
“There was one play when a defender was set up to tackle him, and Barry made one of those moves. The defender just fell down. He never even touched him.”
Almost every week, Sanders added another jaw-dropping run to his highlight reel. The senior rushed for 114 yards against Wichita Northwest, 266 yards against Emporia, and 180 versus Wichita Heights.
Before long, Sanders produced a highlight tape that every college coach would want to get their hands on. The problem is that they couldn’t.
Taking advantage of the fact that Sanders entered the season as an unknown commodity, the Oklahoma State coaching staff held on to the tape for as long as they could.
“I couldn’t get the tape back,” Burkholder said. “Eventually, I had to tell them that I would tell Barry not to go to school there if I didn’t get the tape back.”
Regardless, Sanders remained mostly a secret. According to Sanders’ book, the only schools to show much interest were Emporia State, Iowa State, Tulsa, and Oklahoma State. Sanders received no offers from Kansas, Kansas State or his hometown school, Wichita State.
Wichita State coach Ron Chismar “reportedly said, ‘We don’t need another midget,’” Sanders wrote.
A run at the record
Brad Wiesen, a 52-year-old owner-operator of Wiesen Roofing & Exteriors in Wichita, never played in the NFL. Regardless, in 1985, the former Bishop Carroll tailback was running neck and neck with an all-time great.
Entering the final week of the regular season, Wiesen led the city in rushing with 1,265 yards and 11 touchdowns, while Sanders wasn’t far behind with 1,155 yards and 13 touchdowns. Both players were in striking distance of Wichita’s 10-year-old rushing record set by Southeast’s Tracy Levy with 1,300 yards in 1975.
“We had a lot of expectations as a team that season, so I wasn’t too focused on individual records,” Wiesen said. “But as the season went on, my Dad and I kept saying that maybe we could set the record.”
If anyone was going to beat the record, Wiesen was the likely favorite entering the season. He earned the city rushing title as a junior and was running behind a strong offensive line. When Bishop Carroll and North faced off in the second week of the season, Wiesen ran for 174 yards, including an 82-yard touchdown run, in a 9-0 win. Sanders, who was still playing wingback at the time, was kept to one yard in five attempts on a muddy field.
With Sanders limited to reverse attempts in the first three games, Wiesen built a sizeable lead in the rushing race. However, Sanders gained ground fast. The shifty back from North rushed for at least 100 yards four times and at least 250 yards twice in his first five starts at running back.
Wiesen needed only 36 yards in the final regular-season game against Liberal to beat Levy’s record. Sanders, who was facing Wichita East, was only 110 yards behind Wiesen.
Both players delivered outstanding performances. Wiesen ran for 185 yards on 39 carries during Carroll’s 34-0 win. Sanders led North with 262 yards on 24 carries in a 35-12 victory.
Sanders could have had even more yards, but, with a sizeable lead and a playoff berth in hand, he told Burkholder to let the young kids play rather than go for the record.
“I told him to leave me on the bench and let some of the other guys play,” Sanders wrote. “I cheered them on from the sidelines.”
As a result, Wiesen finished with 1,450 yards for 6.4 yards per carry, while Sanders accumulated 1,417 yards for 10.2 yards per carry. All these years later, the story of Wiesen edging Sanders for the city rushing title lives.
“Brad Wiesen remains the answer to a trivia question in Wichita,” Seminoff said.
Wiesen, who went on to play for Garden City Community College, keeps the achievement in perspective.
“Every once in a while, someone will bring it up,” Wiesen said. “I don’t really like talking about it. It was a long time ago, and I’m just a regular guy. Who knows how many yards Barry would have had if he had started the year at tailback?”
An opponent in high school, Wiesen said he became a huge fan during Sanders’ college and pro years.
“He was the most fun running back to watch ever,” Wiesen said. “Barry was a one of a kind. I still get a kick out of watching the replays of some of his best runs.”
Miracle in Manhattan
Reeves still recalls standing on the sidelines and relishing what he and his teammates believed to be a 14-10 first-round playoff win over Manhattan.
After all, the Redskins led by four points with seven seconds remaining, and Manhattan was at its owns 43-yard-line.
“They were already playing our victory song,” Reeves said.
After that moment, Reeves said everything is a bit of a blur.
“One second I was smiling and the next second I was absolutely crushed,” he said. “I remember the emotions much more than the play. We were all dumbfounded.”
In the final seven seconds, Manhattan quarterback Matt Veach connected with Gar Ball on a 57-yard touchdown pass to give the Indians a 16-14 victory in the 6A playoff game.
“Our players were already dancing,” Burkholder said. “We were moving on in the playoffs.
“It was a perfect pass. It was really a basic play. All they did was throw it up there, and their fastest kid caught it. Our kid was just a smidge late, and they outran us to the end zone. I don’t think they even expected to score.”
Burkholder said he believes Sanders was in at defensive back on the play but that Manhattan threw to the opposite side of the field.
“They threw away from Sanders, because he would have ran him down,” Burkholder said.
Just like that, North’s season and Sanders’ high school career was over.
Burkholder said he’s not sure how far the Redskins, who finished with a 5-5 record, could have advanced in the playoffs if they had held on against Manhattan.
“We were really coming together as a team,” he said.
“That’s crushing for our kids,” Burkholder told Eagle correspondent Mack McClure after the game. “I thought we had the ballgame won. One long pass play erased that.”
Sanders’ playing career, however, was just beginning to take shape. Manhattan coach Lew Lane saw something special from Sanders, who ran for 140 yards and scored two touchdowns in the playoff tilt. Despite starting only seven of the 10 games at running back, Sanders finished the season with 1,557 rushing yards.
“He’s the best back I’ve seen since Jeff Smith,” Lane said of Sanders, comparing him to the former Southeast star who went on to play at Nebraska before four NFL seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
‘Our paths crossed’
Despite all of Sanders’ individual success, he never forgot about the high school coach who gave him a shot at running back.
From time to time, Sanders will reach out to Burkholder.
One of those calls was in Sanders’ rookie season in 1989 when the Lions traveled to face the Green Bay Packers.
“The phone rings, and it’s Barry. He called to see if I saw the game,” Burkholder recalled. “I told him that we didn’t get the game. So I asked him how he did.”
Well, Sanders rushed for 189 yards, his career best at the time.
“He told me how much he rushed for, and I just went nuts,” Burkholder said. “He was really proud of that, and he wanted me to know.”
That game against the Packers was only the beginning for Sanders.
He rushed for at least 100 yards in 76 games of his 10-year NFL career, which is third most in NFL history. Sanders trails only Emmitt Smith (78) and Walter Payton (77).
The Wichita product ran for 1,470 yards as a rookie for the Lions and eclipsed the prestigious 1,000-yard mark in all 10 seasons.
Sanders was a six-time All-Pro and earned NFL MVP honors in 1997 when he rushed for 2,053 yards and 11 touchdowns. Just a year later, he retired while still in the prime of his career.
Despite what many believed to be a premature end to his career, Sanders finished with 15,269 career rushing yards, which remains among the leaders in NFL history.
With numbers like that, it is no surprise that Sanders was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on his first try in 2004.
Burkholder attended the induction ceremony in Canton, Ohio.
“His speech was long. He was going through it, and I started thinking he wasn’t going to mention high school,” Burkholder said.
But then Sanders devoted a big chunk of his speech to his time at Wichita North and what he learned from Coach Burkholder.
What Burkholder’s decision to put him at running back meant to his career wasn’t lost on Sanders.
“The fourth game I started at running back, and it was one of the greatest football years of my life,” Sanders said in his induction speech. “Not just because of earning a scholarship to Oklahoma State but from being around Coach Burkholder, who absolutely loved being around high school kids, coaching football and just being there on the field, and getting ready for Friday nights. He’s the type of guy that I would hope my son could grow up to play for … So I want to thank you, Coach B, for everything.”
It was a tribute Burkholder didn’t see coming.
“The Hall of Fame ceremony was one of the highlights of my life,” Burkholder said. “It was unreal.”
Even after the induction ceremony, Sanders never forgot about Coach B.
In 2014, Sanders called, and Burkholder was excited to tell him about the Wamego football team. The veteran coach took over the struggling program in 2011, and the Red Raiders finished with a 1-8 record that year. However, Burkholder led the team to winning records in each of the next three seasons. By 2014, he had the Red Raiders poised to advance to their first playoff game in a decade.
“We were talking, and I was telling him about the team,” Burkholder said. “He said he wanted to watch me coach again. I told him that we had a game at Nickerson and that he could fly in to Wichita.
“It gets to the day of the game, and I don’t know if he’s coming or not. I knew he might come, but I didn’t know for sure.”
Sanders made his way to the 1,000-population town for the Class 4A Division II district game without anyone knowing.
“Typical Barry, he didn’t want anyone to know he was there,” Burkholder said. “He was in a big, long coat with the collar up. Nobody recognized him. After the game (a 63-10 win by Wamego), my wife pointed him out.
“One of the kids goes back to the locker room and tells everyone, ‘Barry Sanders is here.’ They all come running back out and surround him.”
When they got back to the locker room, Sanders addressed the team and gave the small-town high school players the memory of a lifetime.
“All the kids were sitting there like it was Christmas,” Burkholder said. “The next day, no one was talking about us winning the game. It was all that Barry Sanders was there.”
Burkholder’s coaching days are now over, but his connection with that small, speedy kid from Wichita remains strong.
“A lot of big-time players probably couldn’t even tell you their high school coach’s name,” Burkholder said. “Barry contacts me every year. We talk at least once every year ever since those days at North.
“I was just doing what I loved to do -- coach football and build a team. I was lucky enough that our paths crossed. Thank goodness, they did.”
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