Bringing Pride Back

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Campbell coach Jeff Bayuk

By Joe Scalzo

In 1986, Canfield High School took a chance on a 28-year-old football coach named Jeff Bayuk.

Bayuk had spent the past three years as an assistant at Ursuline under Dick Angle and was taking over a program that had gone 1-19 over the past two years and hadn’t had a winning season since 1980.

That first year, while teaching one of his language arts classes at Canfield Middle School, a student handed him a sticker that read: “Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.”

Bayuk loved it and stuck it on one of his truck windows. The Cardinals won five games over his first two seasons, then went 8-2 in his third. By the time he left two years later, he had helped build a foundation for what is now one of area’s best programs.

“People think I’m crazy sometimes,” Bayuk, now the head football coach at Campbell Memorial High, said. “And whenever anybody says that, I just think of that quote.”

Five years later, in 1991, Bayuk was named head coach at Hubbard, taking over a program that had gone 6-43 over the previous five years.

“I remember a local coach telling me when I took the Hubbard job that I should go to Woodside,” said Bayuk. “He said, ‘Hubbard will never win.’ He told me that in a public place — really loud — and it was kind of embarrassing.

“But I’ve got to give the guy credit. After we turned it around at Hubbard — that first year we won the [Trumbull Athletic Conference] championship — he came to my office and said, ‘I apologize. I was wrong. You must have seen something that nobody else saw.’ ”

Over the next 15 years, he won 112 more games, five more league titles and went to the playoffs six times.

“I love to see when it changes,” he said. “I think that’s the neatest thing.”

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Earlier this week, after a cold and rainy afternoon practice, Bayuk sat inside the coach’s office at Campbell High School. His hair was wet, his shoes and socks were off and there was a film projector running in an adjacent room.

Bayuk could have quit coaching by now, could have been curled up on his couch with a blanket and a book, but there’s something about the job — particularly about the challenge of turning around a program — that keeps him going.

“When I took this job, a businessman in Hubbard told me I’d bit off more than I could chew,” he said. “And I tried to tell him I didn’t think it was a whole lot different than Hubbard was when I got there, or Canfield was when I got there.”

The skepticism didn’t stop there. When interviewing at Campbell, he kept getting asked, “Why do you want to come here?”

“And I just told them, ‘It looks like you guys could use some help,’ ” he said.

Bayuk got hired before the 2007 season. He took his staff from Hubbard with him and immediately set about changing the culture, emphasizing team goals over individual honors and stressing that, if the players did the work, the results would come.

Change didn’t happen immediately. Forced to play a schedule that included games against Howland, Canfield, Poland and Niles, the Red Devils went 1-9 in 2007. Six of the losses were by 20 points or more, including a 49-12 loss to his former team, Canfield.

“I told [Cardinals coach] Mike Pavlansky after we played them the first year, ‘I can’t believe what a difference 20 years makes,’ ” said Bayuk. “It was just the opposite when I was at Canfield. We were so afraid of Campbell. They were so fast and so big and so strong and they’d just knock your head off. And it just went full circle.

“I can’t get it right. When I was at Canfield, I couldn’t beat Campbell and now that I’m at Campbell we can’t beat Canfield.”

Fortunately, two big things happened that offseason. The Red Devils were accepted into the All-American Conference’s Blue Tier, where they would face similar-sized schools, and Bayuk’s changes began to take root.

They went 3-7 last year and are now off to a 4-1 start — their best since going 10-1 in 2000, which also happens to be the school’s last winning season.

“We’re only 4-1 and we could easily end up not having a winning season,” said Bayuk. “But still, four wins is the same as they’ve had the last three years combined. It’s pretty cool right now just to see them having so much fun.

“When we first started winning, they didn’t even know what to do after the games. They would come in here and just look at each other.”

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Chris Copeland, a 5-foot-11, 165-pound senior who plays wide receiver and defensive back, is a three-year letterman for the Red Devils. He was part of undefeated teams in middle school, but things changed once he got to high school. Some kids quit or moved to different schools. The upperclassmen didn’t work as hard. Losing was a habit.

“When [Bayuk] came here, everybody was all about me-me-me-me-me,” Copeland said. “Now everybody’s about the team and making everybody better instead of trying to boost their own stats or get looked at by themselves.

“It’s been real rough the past three years. We’ve always been a winning city and moving up to varsity, we didn’t expect it to go the way it did. But guys got into the weight room, started working hard and everything’s going in the right direction.”

Copeland can remember walking the hallways in previous years, hearing classmates — some of them terrific athletes who could have helped the team — making fun of him.

“It’s easier to go to school when you don’t have guys talking about, ‘Oh, you guys suck’ and all of this,” he said.

Do they wish they had come out?

“Yeah, a lot of them,” he said. “We have a lot of big kids in our school. A couple of them graduated, a couple of them are coming up but they won’t play because of things they hear.

“They should be out the next couple years. The program should keep going up.”

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Junior Skevo Zembillas, a 5-8, 160-pound wide receiver who leads the team in all-purpose yards, sensed a change last spring. More kids showed up for offseason workouts. Attitudes were better. Players started to see themselves as part of a family, not just a team.

“You could tell the kids, including me, started to care much more about the team and not about ourselves,” he said. “We realized we wanted to make the community proud and turn this team around.”

Zembillas is Greek in a city with a strong Greek tradition, so he feels a sense of connection with Campbell that might not be found with players from other schools.

And Campbell has a football tradition that can rival almost any school in the Valley. The Red Devils were founding members of the Steel Valley Conference when John Knapick was coaching and they’ve been to the postseason six times. So the past decade’s disappointment has been particularly tough for a community already dealing with tough economic realities.

This year’s team — like the boys basketball team over the past few years — has been a source of pride in “Soup City.”

“I love seeing older people come to our games because that shows me that something really is happening in this community,” said Zembillas. “It’s all they talk about.”

Despite the good start — it is, after all, just four wins —Bayuk knows his job is just beginning.

“One of the things it’s hard for kids to see, at any place, is putting in all the time you have to put in and working as hard as you have to work and then not reaping any benefits,” he said. “So there’s a lot of skeptical kids here.

“And we might not have 50 kids next year. It might take a couple years. But eventually, the continuity is so important because the community, the school and the kids all know what to expect all the time.”

The city has supported Bayuk since he was hired, even when the team was losing.

He’s looking forward to seeing what happens when the team wins.

“The community spirit is still here,” he said. “We’re just waking it up a little bit.”

scalzo@vindy.com