How Boulder Panthers overcame King Soopers shooting and COVID-19 to reach Class 5A football championship game

Your kid keeps saying he’d run through a brick wall for his offensive line coach. But how many offensive line coaches do you know who would run into a burning building to rescue a 5-year-old girl?

“The parents were outside the home, in a panic, and I said, ‘Is anybody else in there?’” Boulder High assistant football coach Brent Biekert recalled.

See, Biekert’s day job is with the Boulder Police Department. Although back in the summer of 2010, it was actually more of a night job.

And on this night in particular, Biekert and a fellow officer found themselves staring at a house blaze, having arrived on the scene before any fire trucks.

“The parents said, ‘We can’t find our 5-year-old daughter,’” Biekert continued. “I don’t know. I just went in there.”

They raced to her bedroom. Locked. Kicked open the door. No girl. Tried another room. No girl. As smoke clouded their eyes and filled their lungs, time was running short.

“And we were getting ready to leave,” Biekert recalled, “and (the other officer) sees this kid lying on the couch in the front room, fast asleep.”

They scooped her up, chased by a rising wall of flames, and reunited the child with her parents outside.

“I’ve got a lot of good relationships with firefighters,” Biekert chuckled. “They said, ‘Biekert, what were you doing, running in like that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. If my daughter was in that same situation, I’d want somebody to be brave enough to run in and try and get her.’

“I want to be that person, I guess.”

***

They’ve been through the grinder, this Boulder bunch. Mentally. Physically. Emotionally. They kept swinging anyway. When the building’s burning, these Panthers are the type you want to show up before the fire trucks arrive.

Oh, sure, there might have been better, more talented teams running around Class 5A last fall. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a crew tougher than Boulder (6-0), which is slated to meet Far Northeast (5-2) at CHSAA’s final spring football state championship game Saturday night in Pueblo.

Head coach Ryan Bishop lost his mother last September. COVID-19 postponed their season. The King Soopers shooting on March 22 turned their town, and their hearts, upside down.

Because of the coronavirus, the Panthers managed to squeeze only four games in before the spring football playoffs commenced. They played their opener in snow on a Monday night. They’re not always pretty. They scrap. They outlasted East in the 5A semis, 6-3.

“You cherish every opportunity,” Bishop stressed. “Until the playoffs, we didn’t have a single normal week. It’s been a crazy year. Every morning, I’d wake up and look at the phone and say, ‘What’s going to happen today?’”

And sometimes, karma smiles.  The Panthers were originally supposed to open the season against Far Northeast back on March 20, but the game got canceled because of COVID quarantines. It’ll be the first time Boulder High has played for a state football title since 1992, when the Panthers knocked off Pomona, 10-9, in the 6A championship.

In their previous 10 seasons before this spring, the Panthers averaged three wins and seven losses, peaking with a 5-5 mark in 2015.

There’s a reason Biekert has his linemen break their huddles by shouting one word — T-SHOCK! —  at the sky.

“The ‘T’ kind of came from togetherness, which is family, being there for each other and supporting each other,” Biekert explained. “And ‘shock’ was the part I added, because I’d said, ‘You’re going to shock yourselves, you’re going to shock the school, and shock the city and shock the state. And maybe shock the world this coming season.’

“It’s almost prophetic, because they have. No one has given them a chance to do anything. And here we are, sitting on the precipice of something great.”

***

A Longmont native, Biekert’s been on the Panthers staff for four years and part of the Boulder PD for the last 23. He was off duty the afternoon of March 22, prepping for practice in the Boulder High gym when another assistant coach stopped him.

“He said, ‘Hey, Bieke, there were like 12 cops cars in a row that just went whizzing by me,’” Biekert recalled. “And I went, ‘Oh, (expletive.)’”

A shooter had opened fire at the King Soopers on Table Mesa, killing 10 — including Boulder police officer Eric Talley, 51, a member of the force since 2010.

Biekert liked Talley. A lot. They weren’t super close but had remained brothers in the badge, brothers in spirit. Like Biekert, Eric was one of those guys who’d sprint into a burning house if it meant saving a life.

“I was a CU cop when Beth Haynes was killed (in 1994) and responded to that scene,” Biekert said. “I had that same feeling of helplessness, that I should have been there, should have helped. I had that feeling with Eric … maybe I could have helped make a difference.

“I think people only think of the ‘thin blue line’ is what we use to cover up for each other about things. But it’s like what I said to the kids: ‘The thin blue line is when cops are under attack, for whatever reason, that we kind of close our ranks. Because a lot of times, we’re all that we have.

“’So that’s what we need to do as a football team. People are going to make fun of the spring season and give you a hard time about it. That’s OK. We’ve all got each other’s backs.’”

The Panthers have had their community’s backs, and vice versa. Bishop raised money for the victims of the King Soopers shooting and their families via Venmo. At Boulder’s opener, the coach paid tribute to the fallen before the game by laying a No. 10 jersey on the chilly turf. The Panthers went on to beat Mountain Range that night, 24-14, to get the ball rolling.

“All of it coming together is this crazy thing,” said former Panthers lineman Logan Smith, Class of ’20, who played guard and nose tackle for Boulder in the fall of 2019 and was one of the survivors of the March 22 attack.

“Boulder High is a family. Football united the community. The value of it means tremendously more after the tragedy.”

And even more to Smith, who found a father figure and a rock in Biekert during some of his more, shall we say, turbulent teenage moments.

You don’t soon forget the coaches who listen. You never forget the coaches who care.

“My senior year of high school, me and my mother were homeless for several months,” Smith explained. “And Coach Biekert was, I think, the second person I even told at school that I was homeless. The compassion he had, and has, for me, is heart-warming.

“After the shooting and after I came back to Boulder High this year and started working with the team, I realized the person that I would want to be is some sort of police officer, working in law enforcement. Coach Biekert, he’s given me advice and been a big, big mentor in that aspect.”

Now Logan Smith wants to be that person, too. Because it doesn’t take much to help turn a young life around. And it doesn’t take a burning building to make a hero.

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