Warren Western Reserve to honor ’72 state title team

September 7, 2012 at 12:07a.m.

WARREN

It’s been 40 years since Ross Browner has seen his high school teammates.

More than 20 years since he’s visited Warren, his hometown.

Saturday, he’ll get to do both. Like old times.

The highly decorated collegiate player at Notre Dame and 1982 member of the Super Bowl Bengals, Browner fondly remembers his days as a Raider at Warren Western Reserve High.

“Everything just felt right playing there,” he said.

Now an assistant vice president at a credit union in Nashville, Browner will be one of an anticipated 45 former Reserve players coming to Warren on Saturday for a day-long celebration honoring the 1972 state championship football team.

The head coach, Joe Novak, spearheaded this effort back in November. Once a notice was placed in the newspaper on a Sunday, Novak said his phone was “ringing off the hook.”

“They couldn’t wait to get ahold of me and the thing just snowballed after that,” Novak said before noting that the team had a mini-reunion 15 years ago. “It’s really going to be great.”

Western Reserve won the first Class AAA (now Division I) state championship under a playoff system. Going 12-0, with an eventual 37-6 title game win over Cincinnati Princeton, the Raiders had six shutouts.

“We played good defense from the word ‘go,’ Novak said. “That was kind of our signature — an Angle Defense.

“But that’s why these kids are special to me. They were the on-the-field champs. I always told them that they can’t take that away.”

Novak inherited that 1972 team from Dick Strahm and Jim Hillis, who had coached Reserve since the school’s inception five years earlier. In those years as a defensive assistant, Novak said the Raiders lost just five games.

“It wasn’t like I had a lot of work to do,” Novak said. “We had an excellent program and just kept things going. That season was magical and we took it one game at a time. As we won, we gained more and more confidence.

“We had some outstanding talent, but we had a whole bunch of really good high school football players.”

He estimates that the starting backfield averaged a mere 135 pounds. Mike Spiva, the team’s leading rusher, weighed just 128 pounds.

Assistant coach Pat Guiliano said it was a “different, but special crew all around.”

Three — Browner, his younger brother, Jimmy, and Aaron “Chunky” Brown — played in the NFL. Many played in college, four attended Cornell. Billy Williams is now a doctor in Chicago. Neil Hall is an opthamalogist who spent time as a professor at Harvard, Calvin Washington is a veterinarian in Columbus and Chris Mason is an executive at General Motors.

“I knew that we all had destinies,” Browner said. “We all believed in each other, pushed each other and kept each other going. We wanted to go to college and make ourselves into professional people after that.”

Browner was recruited by nearly 40 colleges at Western Reserve. He was courted by legendary coaches like Ara Parseghian, Bo Schembechler and Woody Hayes. But his high school coach had an emblematic coaching career, as well. He went to Miami (Ohio), his alma mater, after a few more years at Reserve and coached under Dick Crum who was one-time Warren Harding assistant. Novak spent three years as a RedHawk, three years at Illinois, four years at Northern Illinois, and 13 at Indiana before returning to NIU in 1996 for the head coaching job.

“He demanded his players to play for him,” Browner said. “That’s how everyone played for him, to the best of our abilities. It felt good and right to play hard for him because he was a fair and honest coach. He kept us in the right situation.”

The assistant coaching staff was “a bunch of young whippersnappers,” Guiliano says. He was just 23 years old; the staff averaged 26.

“We had a great relationship because they were young,” Browner said. “They could relate to us and they wanted to make us successful, while starting their careers off successful too. They worked out problems that we had on and off the field and built us to be a championship team.”

Browner won the Lombardi Trophy as the nation’s best linebacker and was a two-time recipient of the Maxwell Award. Yet, his greatest satisfaction comes from a blossoming family tree. The Browner family has had more players in the NFL than any other family. Ross’ youngest son, Ryland, is a sophomore playing at Arizona. His other son, Pittsburgh Steeler Max Starks, is entering his ninth professional season.

“I just sit back and have to smile,” he said. “It’s just wonderful looking ahead and looking back and enjoying it all.”

Guiliano and Novak, along with George Bollas, Jim McQuaide, Vince Peterson and John Theoharis will be inducted into the Warren Sports Hall of Fame on Saturday, prior to Harding’s game against Cardinal Mooney.