FORT WAYNE and KNOX, Ind. — On a wet grassy field two hours away from home, Myles McLaughlin waited in shotgun formation with his hands ready for more. Every time he had touched the ball in this Indiana state playoff game, he had been swallowed up by defenders. His white and red Knox jersey, now streaked in mud, wore the abuse.
McLaughlin, the thunderbolt of a quarterback who led the nation in rushing yards and touchdowns, had entered the matchup against Bishop Luers High in Fort Wayne, Indiana, needing 364 yards to break Derrick Henry’s national career high school rushing record of 12,124, set from 2009 to 2012.
Week after week, while pursuing this mark, McLaughlin leaped from the anonymity of his small Indiana town into the national spotlight: Rob Gronkowski predicted weeks ago that he was going to break Henry’s record, and Henry himself called McLaughlin “a beast.” The kid went from being a no-star recruit without a Division I scholarship offer to having TikTok videos tagged #mylesmclaughlin reaching nearly 2 million views.
That was the marvel and madness of his record-breaking season: how Myles McLaughlin — who wants to be a special-education teacher one day, or a conservation officer, or just follow his dad and work for the electric company and maybe live near Knox, Indiana — became … this. The football star who rushed for a record 71 touchdowns in a single season sometimes couldn’t believe all the attention himself.
“I feel like my story is the complete opposite of Derrick Henry. Like, I have not been a known name until, really, my senior year,” McLaughlin said. “I feel like, in general, just the last couple of weeks have been crazy.”
At Knox High, they have been keeping count. Right above the doorway of Room B-120, where Mrs. Keiper teaches Criminal Justice, someone displayed a poster board that tracked McLaughlin’s career rushing yards with five individual pieces of paper (1, 1, 7, 6 and another 1). Next to the poster was a Photoshopped image of their classmate as the character Ricky Bobby along with the words: “The Ballad of Myles McLaughlin.” Though McLaughlin has walked beneath this display every morning for first period, last week he said he didn’t realize how close he was to Henry’s record.
“I swear!” McLaughlin blurted as his defense. “I didn’t even know how many yards away I was until someone told me, another news reporter. … I thought I was about 400 or 500 yards away, and he told me it was like 360 or something?”
It’s a remarkable number in a season full of remarkable stats. Entering the state semifinal, McLaughlin already owned the national records for rushing yards and touchdowns in a season. No other player in the history of high school football has had a season like McLaughlin. Him, of all people.
How many high school running backs who ever threatened Henry’s record also served as 10-year members of the 4-H club? The only way McLaughlin will miss out on showing his pigs and goats at the fair next summer will be if he’s away at college, wherever that’ll be. McLaughlin’s undecided, probably because he had no prospects to play in college until Division I offers from Ball State and Football Championship Subdivision schools Valparaiso and Murray State arrived over the past few weeks.
“I feel like I can play. I feel like if you just watch my film, I can do everything,” McLaughlin said. “I definitely feel like I can be a running back at the next level.”
If McLaughlin sounds reactive, he has had practice. Because these days, remarkable things accomplished by a no-name out of northwest Indiana can be met by skeptics on social media.
He has been aware of the comment sections. That, throughout his career, McLaughlin has hogged all the carries in Coach Russ Radtke’s throwback offense, and that his team doesn’t play against real competition. In a Reddit thread that began with a question (“Do you think Myles McLaughlin will be a college bust?”), someone wrote that he’s not fast enough to play in college. (Imagine waking up one morning, logging on to your computer and feeling the overwhelming urge to speculate how an adolescent will fail at the next level.)
Truth is, McLaughlin shared the backfield and the offensive load over his first three seasons — initially as a running back surrounded by upperclassmen, including his best friend, Jake Conroy, who’s now in college — before moving to quarterback last year.
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Also, Knox High has a student population hovering around 500. It’s small enough to play 2A football in Indiana — and will move down next season — but instead competes in the larger 3A division. On Friday night, Bishop Luers’ varsity roster listed 58 players and 16 coaches in addition to a strength and conditioning coach. Knox’s roster did not.
And though McLaughlin rarely brags, questioning his speed brings out his strongest defense: “I am plenty fast enough,” he said, offering how he clocked in at 4.48 seconds in the 40-yard dash last summer.
That’s fast — just not as fast as his life has changed. In this season’s third game, McLaughlin carried the ball 27 times for 439 yards and accounted for 10 touchdowns against Culver Academies. By October, he broke the Indiana career rushing record (10,867). This month, as he approached Henry’s mark, it wasn’t just his classmates in Room B-120 keeping count.
On Friday, an older man from Illinois traveled to Fort Wayne and sat behind McLaughlin’s mom in the stands, telling her how he started following all of her son’s games after reading about him in Sports Illustrated.
“I asked my husband [one day],” Suzann McLaughlin recalled, “‘What is happening?’”
Myles McLaughlin comes from a long line of fast feet, those that wander but always find their way back to Starke County, Indiana.
In the 1950s, Myles’s great-grandfather Keith was part of the sixth generation of Fingerhuts who had perfected the family’s butter creme coffee cake recipe. He also was a fullback and good enough to make it all the way to Alabama, but he played just one year before transferring to St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana. By 1958, Keith Fingerhut was receiving typewritten letters from professional football teams, including one on Chicago Bears Football Club stationery signed in black ink by George Halas.
Fingerhut didn’t choose Chicago, nor Pittsburgh, nor the Montreal Alouettes, though he did sign a contract. Instead, he took up the family business and went to work at Fingerhut Bakery in North Judson.
In the late 1990s, Josh McLaughlin also had a stellar high school career in the county. After setting Knox’s career rushing mark, he too, enrolled at St. Joseph’s. But Josh returned home and married Suzann, Fingerhut’s granddaughter, and they raised three boys on Bass Lake.
When their oldest wasn’t tubing in the summer or hunting deer in the fall, Myles followed his father’s footsteps straight into the Knox backfield. By his sophomore year, he had broken Josh’s school record. Though Myles still has dreams of going pro, he’s much like his great-grandpa, the fullback turned baker: He has plans beyond football.
Since his freshman year, McLaughlin has volunteered in Tiffany Hoar’s Applied Skills classroom. And last week, two days before the state semifinal, he calmly spoke to a student who was on the verge of a meltdown, talking him out of flipping a desk. Then McLaughlin helped his friend Carson grip a pencil for a work assignment. His calloused right hand, swollen from all the football, guided the scribbles as the pair drew trees together.
“Touchdown! Touchdown! Touchdown, Myles!” Carson repeated.
Wherever football takes him, McLaughlin thinks he might major in special education.
“It’s not a bad [plan]. I know I have a lot of things if I wanted to come back here. Like, where my dad works … and I know I can get a job there. And I know I can get a lot of jobs around here, and they’re all really good-paying,” McLaughlin said. “[But] I kind of do want to get out of here and experience the real world or whatever. And then maybe I’ll come back. I don’t know.”
Back on the muddy field pocked by cleats, McLaughlin waited for the snap in the rain, against a running clock. His high school career was ending in mercy. The students in the Bishop Luers section no longer felt the need to serenade him with “Over-rated!” chants.
McLaughlin received the snap and then … handed the ball to a teammate. He finished with 78 yards. His night didn’t end like the final scene in “Hoosiers,” where the small-town kids win the day. The final score: Bishop Luers 35, Knox 0.
McLaughlin led teammates through the handshake line. Then, as Knox players gathered near midfield, he dropped to one knee and held his face mask. Conroy, his best friend, was now on the field; he leaned down, held McLaughlin and told him he loved him. Then, Conroy raced to the sideline and returned with a brown towel. McLaughlin pulled up his helmet and used it to wipe his eyes.
“I’m just grateful for everything that’s happened over the last four years, here at Knox, and everything that’s happened even before high school,” McLaughlin said. “But definitely sucks to go out like this.”
About 25 minutes later, students, parents and fans flooded the parking lot near the visiting locker room. When McLaughlin briefly emerged, three teen boys dressed in Bishop Luers black noticed, and one opened his wide and exclaimed, “Oh, he’s right there!” The teen hesitated to approach because McLaughlin, his eyes still glassy, had found the arms of his mom and family members. Those in Knox red huddled around their star football player. Their wild ride had ended — a little bit short of history but with a lifetime of memories. It was time to go home.
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