Photo Credit: David Smith/Special to PrepsKC 
Trevor Klein is used to being busy on Friday nights. This Friday, the East Buchanan football coaches made his workload even bigger.
Klein is normally East Buchanan’s workhorse running back, as he was Friday when he rushed for 145 yards on 28 carries and figured in three touchdowns in the Bulldogs’ 40-24 victory over St. Michael the Archangel Catholic at Lee’s Summit West. But on this chilly night he also had another job: help contain St. Michael’s potent passing attack.
“Coach (Adam) Lewis and coach (Dan) Ritter they just drew it up this week,” said Klein, a 5-foot-6, 166-pound senior. “Just play me at (defensive) end, trying something new. I usually don’t play a lot of defense.”
Ritter, East Buchanan’s head coach, wanted to use the power and speed Klein possesses on offense on the other side of the ball to bring some added pressure to St. Michael’s quarterback Cameron Zaun. For the most part it worked. Zaun did throw for 193 yards and two touchdowns, but the Guardians struggled most of the game to find any traction.
“We knew this quarterback is really, really good and he slips out of the pocket easy,” Ritter said. “We wanted to flush him out of the pocket ASAP so he’s on the run, so why don’t we put our fastest player at D end for one game just to see if we can get to him. He got to him a few times, he lost contain a few times but he did a good job of making that quarterback get out of his reads.”
While that strategy worked nicely for East Buchanan (7-0), nothing worked at the start of the game. The Bulldogs marched backward 21 yards on the game’s first possession thanks to a 8-yard loss on a bad snap followed by a holding call wiping out a 21-yard Klein run and a false start.
St. Michael (5-2), meanwhile, moved the ball downfield with short passes until stalling out on the Bulldogs’ 6-yard line. A 23-yard field goal by Jackson Steiner gave the Guardians a 3-0 lead.
That lead didn’t last long. Set up nicely by Klein’s 57-yard kickoff return, East Buchanan needed only three plays on its next possession to set up Klein for a 3-yard halfback touchdown pass to Aidan Hensley.
Klein scored on a 4-yard run at the start of the second quarter, and Hensley scored a defensive TD when he fell on a lateral by Zaun in the end zone. Hensley later had to leave the game with a dislocated elbow.
And just like that, East Buchanan had a 21-3 lead early in the second quarter.
“We shot ourselves in the foot with a ton of penalties,” Ritter said. “We have to learn from those and get better. We can’t have a game with so many penalties. But our kids are resilient.”
Senior running back Trevor Green scored St. Michaels’ first TD on a 1-yard run, and East Buchanan answered right back with a 18-yard TD pass from quarterback Gage Busby to a wide open Mason Brown
St. Michael closed within 28-17 on a dazzling catch by Green on a 14 yard pass from Zaun just before halftime, but that was a close as the Guardians would get. Busby hit Brown again for a 43-yard TD pass in the third quarter and tossed a 3-yard TD strike to Klein in the fourth for a 40-17 lead. Busby would finish the game with 163 yards and three TDs.
Zaun added a 5-yard TD pass to Cole Edmondson in the closing seconds.
“We gave up too many big plays,” St. Michael coach Andrew Pitts said. “But our guys battled hard and I’m proud of them.”
East Buchanan, last year’s Class 1 state champions and currently ranked No. 2 in Class 2, broke a 70 year-old school record with its 20th consecutive victory. The 1952-53 Bulldogs had won 19 straight.
“Just to say that this team really is the best team to play here at East Buchanan really meant a whole lot,” Ritter said. “And the fact that we played a really good team made it even sweeter.”
