Former Boardman coach D.J. Ogilvie finds a home in southwest Florida

By Tom Balog

Special to The Vindicator

ENGLEWOOD, Fla.

D.J. Ogilvie realized most radically the challenge he was in for, taking over a losing Lemon Bay High School football program of traditionally little expectation, at a July weightlifting session.

A defiant senior backup lineman, Devin Kimberlin, backtalked his new coach during a pushup contest that gave Ogilvie, the “new sheriff in town,” as the Lemon Bay stadium public address announcer would later describe him, a chance to enforce his law, demanding total effort.

“He’s down, he’s behind. I hear him mumbling, ‘This is [stupid], this is so [stupid],’” Oglivie said, boiling over again, as he recounted the confrontation. “I turned around and I go, ‘Hey, Devin, do you have a problem with what we’re doing?’

“He stands up and goes, ‘Yeah, I’m tired of busting my [butt].’ I’m like, ‘Oh, Devin is tired of busting his [butt]? Oh, isn’t that nice? Isn’t what we’re supposed to do?’ Like, are you kidding me? I started getting ]furious]. ‘Matter of fact, there’s the frickin’ exit sign, if you don’t want to be here.’”

Ogilvie, the transplanted Boardman coach, fiercely conveyed his commitment to change attitudes and work ethic, just like he had while turning the Spartans into a winning program, and United, where he was coach, before that.

“He was just showing that ‘I’m not gonna take crap from anyone, because I know what’s best for this team,’ “ said senior center Kellan Constantine, a two-year starter and co-captain, who witnessed the exchange. “He wasn’t there to make friends, he was there to win.”

Kimberlin stayed and survived along with 42 other varsity players through Ogilvie’s bumpy first season at Lemon Bay, whose most prominent recent football alum is Matt Piloto, the Mount Union quarterback.

Behind the 1,611-yard rushing season of workhorse senior running back Andrew Taylor, the Manta Rays started 4-1 and ended 5-5.

It was a measure of success for a program at a school with 1,340 students that had won only 16 games in its previous seven seasons.

“It was the first non-losing season in eight years, since 2003,” Constantine said. “We go from 3-7 to 5-5 in one year. I thought that was pretty amazing ... We were just a bunch of kids who never knew who this coach was, and we went out and had our best season in eight years.”

Had Lemon Bay finished 6-4, Ogilvie’s 2011 Manta Rays would have tied for the third-best record in school history.

“Going 5-5 is a huge step in the right direction,” said Ogilvie, who lost 20 players from spring practice through attrition. “The best season since 2003 has only been 3-7, so our kids are real excited and happy about the season.”

Lemon Bay athletic director Tom Catanzarite and principal Dan Jeffers were equally impressed by the energy Ogilvie channeled and the tone he set for his players.

“I noticed the attitudes of the kids ...they’re upbeat, they seem like they’re having fun,” Catanzarite said. “Parents who have come up to me have told us they believe the program is on the right track. It seems like everything is positive.”

“Kids seem to really connect with him,” Jeffers said. “He’s been good for the football program, he’s been good for our school. He’s very enthusiastic, it’s transpired to his football players. It’s been contagious. During the interview process, the first time I talked to D.J., my first impression, it was almost like it was meant to be, and it has worked out that way.”

Ogilvie’s transition has been a success if only because, like Kimberlin, he has persevered after taking a job 1,200 miles from home, as a total stranger.

“I didn’t know anybody at all,” Ogilvie said. “My sister lives in Naples, an hour and 20 minutes away. But there was no direct connection here.”

However, he soon bonded with Sean Huber, the Lemon Bay assistant athletic director, a Michigan native who attended Findlay College. Huber, 41, is also an assistant coach on Ogilvie’s staff, as well as the Lemon Bay varsity basketball coach.

“We’re the same age,” said Ogilvie, 42. “I would talk to him every other day, finding things out. He had a lot of insight. He was like the ‘go-to’ guy. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I would be here.”

A year ago, Oglivie, a 1986 Boardman graduate, was completing his seventh season as the head coach at his alma mater. He had no idea he would wind up at a school he never heard of, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two hours south of Tampa.

Five months later, in April, Ogilvie was southbound.

The impetus was Ogilvie’s outlook for his family’s future.

Ogilvie’s sister, Gwen, lives in Naples, with her husband, Dan Pallante, the former Boardman High football coach who teaches and coaches at Naples Barron Collier High, and their four children.

His widowed mother, Jackie, could also be moving to Florida after retiring from her teaching position at Austintown Middle School. She has friends in nearby North Port, he said.

Even with his wife, Toni, and their four children, Ogilvie did not want to be left behind in Boardman, without his mother and sister.

So he pursued the opening at Lemon Bay, which Catanzarite said attracted 200 applicants.

“My wife and I always thought of moving somewhere warm,” he said.

So Ogilvie and his wife decided that they and their children, Sydni, 16, Kelsi, 13, David, 9, and Andrew 6, would relocate. Florida’s acceptance of Ogilvie’s 18 years and his wife’s nine years of teaching tenure from other states made this opportunity ideal.

“Nobody hires people with that many years and gives them tenure. We found out they do here,” Ogilvie said.

Toni, who taught at United, teaches math at Ainger Middle School in Englewood. Ogilvie teaches three math and two weightlifting classes at Lemon Bay.

“It all fell perfectly into place, so we know it was supposed to be,” Toni said.

Boardman defensive coordinator Mike Popio, who worked six years under Ogilvie, said the Spartans coaches and players had no hint last season, that it would be Ogilvie’s last guiding the Spartans, whom he had led to a pair of playoff berths, in 2007 and 2009.

And some players, like Popio’s son, Danny, a senior linebacker, felt betrayed when Ogilvie resigned.

“It wasn’t going to be good, no matter when it happened,” Ogilvie said. “When you leave a place, you always want them to be upset that you left, not glad. In a way, that’s a good thing.

“A lot of those kids were upset. I don’t blame them. I had tons of kids come up to me, hug me and tell me, ‘We understand what you’re doing.’ “

Tucked away in Charlotte County, 40 miles south of Sarasota, Lemon Bay is surrounded by larger schools with better quality athletes, like Venice High, which won a state football championship in 2000 and recently sent Trey Burton to the University of Florida, and Charlotte High, which has produced several Division I players.

The Englewood community has long accepted that Lemon Bay, competing now in Florida’s largest classification, is not a football school.

Relative to Mahoning County football, Lemon Bay, which plays in the same four-team district (league) as Charlotte, would struggle to be competitive with mid-level northeast Ohio programs, Ogilvie said.

“We’d be like a Struthers, a Salem, a medium All-American Conference team,” Ogilvie said. “Poland, Canfield and Howland would drill us.

“Charlotte would be a very good Federal League team, they’d be like a McKinley, Glen Oak, Boardman. We have a super long way to go, just to get competitive with those guys.”

Lemon Bay has not made the Florida High School Activities Association playoffs in eight years.

“We’re pretty much on the two-three win cycle for the last six, seven years,” Catanzarite said.

Ogilvie suspended two players for three games for missing practice.

“He says to the kids all the time, ‘I’ve got to be more like you, or you’ve got to be more like me? Which one do you think it is?’ “ Huber said.

“The biggest thing was changing their work ethic and mentality in the weightroom,” Ogilvie said. “We’re not physically strong enough. There are so many similarities to the way Lemon Bay is now, to how Boardman was, in 2004. Chaney, St. Ignatius, McKinley, Hoover, they would just physically beat the tar out of us.”

The Lemon Bay players appreciated Ogilvie’s hands-on approach. He acted as the scout team quarterback and did pushups when, for example, he fumbled a snap.

“He got his face on the ground and did his 15 pushups,” Huber recalled. “At first, it was kind of funny. Then you realize, everybody is holding each other accountable from top to bottom. That’s a direct reflection of Coach Oglivie. You have to be the example.”

“He would always be involved,” Constantine said. “He would show exactly what you had to do.”

Ogilvie is also gaining the respect of opposing coaches, like veteran John Davis, of Clearwater Central Catholic, after his Marauders blanked Lemon Bay 28-0 in a steady rain.

“Lemon Bay is a much-improved football team, they’re doing the right things,” Davis said. “They made it tough on us.

“They’re not a very big team, but physically they get after you. They’re going to be pretty good.”

Ogilvie and hs family have settled in nearby Rotonda, the community best known for hosting in the 1970s, the made-for-TV Superstars competition.

It was at Rotonda that the late former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, almost drowned in the Superstars swimming event.

“I was about seven years old, I remember watching that (Superstars) on TV,” Ogilvie said. “Actually an assistant principal told me where that took place. A couple months ago I got on my motorcycle and drove over. It’s like a little bike trail and there’s a VFW there. If you went there, you wouldn’t know that’s actually what it was.”

In the community, Ogilvie has spoken to the local Buckeye Club, a group of transplanted Ohioans, at a local restaurant, the Country Hound, whose owner is from Warren.

“It seems like people are warmer down here,” Ogilvie said. “They’ve all been very accommodating and interested and really reached out to my kids and wife, to help us fit in.”

But Ogilvie did have a support system of transplanted friends and family from Youngstown in place before he arrived.

Retired former Boardman High basketball coach Alan Burns has a winter residence in nearby Venice and Burns’ daughter, Terri, and son-in-law, former Youngstowner Lee Zabel, live in Sarasota.

Zabel, whose sons now run their family business, Zabel Restaurant Equipment, on Market Street, has had a longtime friendship with Ogilvie.

Zabel was Ogilvie’s freshman basketball coach at Boardman, and brought him and his friends to Sarasota for the first time as a teenager, to spend his high school Easter breaks on Siesta Key.

In April, Zabel let Ogilvie and his son, David (nicknamed “Brutus” after the Ohio State mascot), stay at his home for several weeks while he looked for a house for his family, who moved down in May.

When Boardman made the playoffs, Ogilvie listened to the broadcast of the Spartans’ first-round loss to Cleveland St. Ignatius on the internet.

“Missing the guys you coached with, hearing their success, you kind of miss that,” Ogilvie said.

But he has no intention of moving back to Ohio.

“We knew when we got in the car, I told my wife, throw away the rearview mirror,” Ogilvie said. “No sense in even thinking about it.

“We miss the church we went to and guys I taught with and coached with,” he said. “But, overall, we’re glad we made the move.”

Tom Balog, a Youngstown native, is a sports writer for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and can be reached via email at tom.balog@heraldtribune.com