Doyel: Meet the man who invented New Pal football

The social studies teacher watched from a corner of Lucas Oil Stadium. He was standing at field level, next to the end zone, maybe five paces from the little orange pylon. That wasn’t his football team out there Friday night, those New Palestine Dragons trying to win a second consecutive state championship, but that’s his football program.

And so this is his story.

He’s 76 years old. His name is Marvin Shepler. Maybe the name rings a bell? New Pal plays at Shepler Field, which says something about his impact, but doesn’t say enough. Nothing could say enough. This story will try, and this story will fail.

Strange as it might seem, what with New Pal entrenched as one of the state’s most dominant programs — since coach Kyle Ralph arrived in 2013, the Dragons have gone 42-2 and set state records for points and yards in a season — there was no football program here before Marvin Shepler arrived in 1968.

There were no footballs.

No weight room, no weights, no practice field. There was a stadium where the junior high team had been playing, and that’s where the varsity was going to play. It’s also where the varsity was expected to practice, but Marvin Shepler — who had coached at Edinburgh from 1964-67 — wouldn’t have it.

“That’s not how you run a program,” he was telling me Friday night before the Class 5A title game, which New Pal lost 64-61 to Fort Wayne Snider.

A real program, even a program with just 26 players and no weight room, has a separate practice field. And Marvin Shepler had noticed that expanse of weeds next to the high school, an area that has since become a parking lot. In 1968, that area looked big enough to become a practice field. So what Marvin Shepler did was, he packed up his lawn mower, drove it to the school and cut the weeds off that field. Then he and his wife lowered the blades to divvy up the field into 5-yard segments. They got chalk and lined the field.

“It wasn’t pretty,” Shepler says. “But it worked.”

Well, the practice field was a Mona Lisa compared to the trash Shepler was using for weights. And trash is a word you can read literally. The team had no weights, so Shepler asked his players to bring the heaviest stuff they could find from home.

“Farming community,” Shepler says of New Palestine, as he smiles at me just off the end zone at Lucas Oil Stadium. “They brought axles.”

What, I ask, is an axle?

“Like cars have,” he says.

You mean that thing that holds the wheels?

“That was our bench press,” he says.

Their free weights? Kids brought in old coffee cans, filled them with concrete, shoved a pipe between two of them, and there you had it. Barbells.

Shepler commandeered an old storage room inside the school — the guidance office, today — and set up the weights in there. Well, until he realized his team didn’t have a locker room. Shepler asked for one, and the school responded by hammering nails into the walls of the storage room. That’s where the team got dressed and hung its clothes.

But now it needed a new spot to lift weights.

“So I found an empty room on the second floor and took it over,” Shepler says. “Big mistake.”

Don’t tell me …

“Yeah — we were dropping weights right through the ceiling,” he says. “The floor wasn’t made to hold that kind of weight.”

So it was difficult, OK? And for eight seasons the record showed it. The Dragons posted losing seasons six times in those first eight years, but the breakthrough was 1976. New Pal went 9-1, losing only 7-6 to Triton Central, behind a sophomore quarterback named Al Cooper.

New Pal went 169-104 over the next 25 years, and Marvin Shepler won three sectionals and reached the 1990 state title game. When he retired from coaching in 2001, he was 20th in the state with 216 career victories. He was inducted into the Indiana Football Hall of Fame in 2003.

In 2000 Marvin Shepler founded the youth football league in New Pal. Starting in first grade, kids play tackle. The stars on the last three New Pal teams, who went on to play at Shepler Field, learned the game in Shepler’s league. New Pal senior quarterback Alex Neligh, who has thrown for more than 5,000 yards and run for more than 3,000, played for league teams called the Tigers, Cowboys, Giants, Florida and Penn State.

Al Cooper, the quarterback from 1976, is the New Pal athletics director now. He put together the hiring committee in 2012 that settled on a 29-year-old with no head coaching experience, some former college lineman working as a high school assistant in Cincinnati named Ralph Kyle…. No, sorry. His name was Kyle Ralph. Something like that. The committee liked him, because Marvin Shepler liked him.

“He knew,” New Pal principal Keith Fessler was telling me Friday night.

Shepler saw Ralph’s attention to detail, his confidence, his decency. He saw a family man, a motivator, an innovator who could do with ordinary-looking high school kids what Marvin Shepler had done with used coffee cans: turn them into something formidable.

And Kyle Ralph, he embraced Marvin Shepler in return. He paid homage to the former coach by demanding New Pal return to its ways of “Red Rage,” the nickname Shepler had given his defense. He invited Shepler to speak to the team before a game last year. And after that 2014 season, after New Pal had steamrolled to a 15-0 record and the Class 4A title and a state-record 851 points and 6,636 yards, the Dragons held a pep rally at the school gym and one of the seniors took the microphone and invited the social studies teacher to come down and get his state championship ring.

He’d earned it. By starting the high school program in 1968. And the youth program in 2000. And doing both the right way.

Down the gym stairs came Marvin Shepler, a man known around the school as the social studies teacher. Kids were buzzing. He coached football? Mr. Shepler? Is that why the Dragons play on Shepler Field?

“Lots of them had no idea,” says Fessler.

The present is a lot easier to grasp than the past. The way New Pal has played in three years under Kyle Ralph — his Dragons are undefeated in 30 regular-season games and have produced two of the three most prolific offensive seasons in Indiana history — it might seem like the new coach invented the game around here.

When the truth is this: The old coach, the social studies teacher — Mr. Shepler — really did invent the game around here.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.