For Thomas More football, winning starts at home (with seven lucky home games)

By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter

As the Thomas More Saints head into their second year in the Ohio-centric, demographically- and geographically sensible Great Midwest Athletic Conference and third season under Coach Chris Norwell in 2024, there’s a different number the TMU players and coaches are focused on.

That number would be seven – for the home games the Saints will host at Republic Bank Field this season starting with Saturday’s noon opener hosting Davenport University, a team that beat TMU, 31-17, in last season’s opener in Iowa.

And no, the Saints aren’t spending a million dollars to buy an extra home game the way the Alabama’s and Ohio State’s of the world do. That’s not the game the small private Crestview Hills college is playing.

But offering a Saturday afternoon of family and fun – and football – well, this is the place, they’ll tell you even before you ask.

“Our guys play extremely hard at home,” Norwell says, “it’s such a great small college atmosphere.”

“It’s awesome here, one of the best atmospheres in college football,” says redshirt sophomore center Ryan Reynolds (not that other RR), a 6-foot-2, 285-pound center out of Cincinnati LaSalle.

But atmosphere alone won’t get the job done for a program that likes to think of itself as fighting to get to the top half of the GMAC where Tiffin was the top team a year ago and Findlay is this year’s pick to win it all. Thomas More, meanwhile, was picked 10th preseason a year ago and finished seventh at 4-5 in the league (5-6 overall).

This year a more mature, tested TMU team is picked seventh with a goal of finishing above .500 the second time around.

“Last year there were a bunch of unknowns for us in the GMAC,” Norwell said after switching over from the NAIA’s Mid-South Conference. “Now we understand the personalities of each team and what we have to do.”

Simply stated, it’s this: Get everybody going together “so that the offense and defense complement each other,” Norwell says. No more having one group show up but not the other.

Sebastian Bachler, who steps into the starting middle linebacker’s role, addresses that. “I think that’s huge,” he says of both sides of the ball getting it, well, together.

“We feed off each other,” the 6-1, 230-pound redshirt senior says, “I think you’ll see that a lot.”

But that’s not all.

“My first year here was Coach Norwell’s first,” Bachler says. “You want to play for your head coach.”

Norwell, out of Cincinnati Anderson and in his 19th season at Thomas More after coordinating the defense and setting the record as a player at the University of Illinois for most career starts by a D-lineman with 46 in a career that ended up in the Rose Bowl, makes that easy to do as a players’ coach. “We want to make things as simple as we can for our players so they can play fast,” Norwell says.

“We were highly competitive last year,” Norwell says of the Saints’ inaugural season. Just not quite enough to get over that .500 mark, same as the year before, when TMU finished 5-6 both seasons.

With the roster numbers set at 36 equivalency scholarships and a roster of 140 (down from a high of 160), “that 140 number is by design, an institutional decision,” Norwell says of the TMU formula: “Recruit, retain and develop student-athletes at Thomas More.”

The roster numbers are led by four returning all-conference players – 6-4, 315-pound junior guard Kyle Hillerich (Louisville Manual); 5-10, 180-pound senior wide receiver Freddie Johnson (Cincinnati Colerain); 6-5, 235-pound junior tight end Mike Kirch (Cincinnati Elder) and senior punter Elgin Phillips (Fairfield, Ohio). Also back is GMAC Co-Freshman of the Year Evan Brown, a 6-0, 170-pound sophomore wide receiver from Lexington Christian.

Distributing the ball to them will be returning quarterback Rae’Von Vaden (5-10, 200), a grad student out of Louisville Moore. He totaled 1,563 yards passing on 151 of 268 last fall and another 542 running for a total of 22 touchdowns (13 passing, nine rushing) against nine interceptions.

“Rae is a very dynamic football player,” Norwell says. “He can attack you both ways with great reads and make those great reads when we need it.”

Behind Vaden are Simon Kenton alum Chase Crone (6-2, 205, sophomore) and Griffin Scalf (6-3, 225, redshirt freshman, Cincinnati Anderson).

But if there’s a name to add to this list, Reynolds – speaking for the O-line, says it’s redshirt junior running back Jaden Hall (6-0, 205, Springfield Shawnee). “He was here last year but he’s taken it to the next level,” Reynolds says of Hall, who gained 587 yards (3.9 average) with nine TD last fall, “in the weight room and the film room.”

Bachler’s candidate for a defender to keep your eye on is sophomore D-lineman Trey Weems (6-4, 245) out of Griffin, Ga. “He’s a dawg,” Bachler says, “he turned heads as a freshman.”

A couple of potential freshman head-turners this season out of Northern Kentucky, Norwell says, are 6-5, 245-pound Kolton Smith out of Newport Central Catholic, a tight end playing quarterback a year ago but now back to his natural position “and having a good camp,” Norwell says.

On defense, he says Cooper alum Jack Lonaker (6-0, 225) is “a tough, hard-nosed kid who loves football.”

Three one-score losses in the final four games cost the Saints a winning season and one game especially rankles Bachler – a 35-33 loss to Hillsdale after TMU had gone “up 20-0 at the half,” Bachler says. “We lost a game we should have won and it cost us the first winning season for Thomas More as a scholarship program.”

To see the 2024 Football Roster in full, along with player bios, and the full coaching staff, click here.

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