Photo

Photo by: William D. Lewis

Hubbard’s Larry and Isaiah Scott bump fists after Larry scored against Canfield during their Oct. 14 game. The Eagles can become the Valley’s first public school in 15 years to win a state title.

By Joe Scalzo

scalzo@vindy.com

On Monday afternoon, at the same time he would normally be at football practice, the last Mahoning Valley public school coach to play for a state championship was suffering from a serious case of playoff envy.

"It stinks,” said Canfield High football coach Mike Pavlansky, whose Cardinals finished 5-5 to finish 17th in Division III, Region 7. “I have the end-of-the-season blues.”

At this time nine years ago, Pavlansky was in the midst of the most magical run in Canfield’s football history. Led by two senior studs in Angelo Babbaro (an electrifying running back/cornerback who played on Villanova’s national championship team) and Kyle Banna (a bruising fullback/linebacker who played 21 games at YSU) and a junior quarterback/safety Sean Baker (now a safety with the Atlanta Falcons), the Cardinals won their first 14 games before falling to Toledo Central Catholic in the Division II state final, 31-29.

The next morning, Cardinal Mooney lost to Coldwater in the Division IV state championship game. Since then, Mooney, Ursuline and Warren JFK have played in a combined 10 state championship games, winning six.

The Valley’s 42 public schools, meanwhile, have been shut out. In fact, no area public school has brought home a title since Poland in 1999, the longest such streak in Valley history.

Is this the year that streak ends?

Could be.

History lesson

The first thing Paul Hulea wants you to know about that 1999 team is this: The first time he talked about winning a state championship was in Week 15.

“The biggest difference between public and private is when you’re a public school, you’re going from game to game, series to series, just trying to survive,” said Hulea, who was Poland’s head coach in 1999 and is now an assistant for the Bulldogs. “The private school expectations are to win it, but it’s a lot different for us. To get it done at a public school, you’ve got to be real focused on what you’re doing at the time.”

The Bulldogs defeated a Catholic school, Columbus Watterson, 20-13 in the Division III final but the fact that they were a public school wasn’t as notable at the time.

Fifteen public schools from the Mahoning Valley have advanced to the state championship game since the playoffs began in 1972. Seven have won it all, including two of the first four big-school crowns: Warren Western Reserve (1972) and Warren Harding (1974).

There was a 12-year drought between Brookfield’s 1978 championship and Warren Harding’s 1990 title, but three other area public schools won titles over the next decade: West Branch (1994), Lisbon (1995) and Poland (1999).

By contrast, Cardinal Mooney (eight), Ursuline (four) and JFK (one) have combined for 13 titles all-time. Statewide, private schools win about 50 percent of the state championships, despite making up about 18 percent of the OHSAA’s membership.

While many believe Hubbard will be the team to end the Valley’s drought — the Eagles (10-0) won the Associated Press poll title this week and have won every game by at least 20 points — Eagles coach Brian Hoffman hasn’t talked about the streak.

“It’s not really something that as a coach you get together with the other guys you know and say, ‘By the way, it’s been 15 years,’” he said. “If that’s your battle cry, I think you’re kind of missing the mark. We’re worrying about what we can control.”

Talent key to a title

So what does it take for a public school to win it?

Well, the first ingredient is (obviously) talent.

“You need chicken to make chicken salad,” said Western Reserve coach Andy Hake, whose team has lost in the state semifinals in two of the last three years. “Bill Belichick wasn’t winning [anything] in Cleveland, but once he got those monsters on defense and got Tom Brady, he started winning.

“Me, I got [quarterback] John Clegg, [OL] Matt Mace and [WR] Joe Falasca, so guess what? I’ve got a chip and a chair. If not, I could be coaching my [butt] off and in the end I might be 4-6.”

Theoretically, every playoff team has a one in 32 chance of winning it all. Realistically, that’s ridiculous. Hubbard has three Division I recruits (so far) in running backs Larry Scott (Michigan State) and George Hill (Ohio State) and offensive lineman Matt Jones (West Virginia), which gives the Eagles a much better chance of knocking off two-time defending champion Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary than just about anyone else in Division III.

“Yeah, if you’re an oddsmaker setting the Vegas line, not everybody is equal,” Hulea said.

Although some public schools have championship-level teams every year — public schools in the Midwest Athletic Conference in western Ohio have won 24 football titles, for instance — in the Valley, only Mooney and Ursuline have been able to consistently compete for titles in the 21st century.

“We have great playoff teams; we just don’t have all-star teams,” Hake said. “The teams we play with, they play hard for their community. They’re just not all-star teams. We take a lot of pride in that we’re 3-1 against parochial schools in the playoffs, so I’m not saying you can’t do it. It’s just an uphill battle.”

While private schools can draw athletes from several school districts, those schools argue that open enrollment has equaled the playing field. Maurice Clarett, for instance, commuted to Warren Harding from 1999-2001 from the South Side of Youngstown.

Boardman, Canfield, Poland and Springfield, however, are closed enrollment schools, which means athletes (like former Lowellville running back Pete Perry, a standout on Poland’s 1999 team) must establish residency in those school districts to be eligible.

“I don’t know if that makes it harder,” Pavlansky said. “I’ve never been a part of an open enrollment situation. It is what it is. It’s what our area wants to be. We’re gonna take who comes through our front doors.”

Hulea goes a step further, believing it can be an advantage.

“It’s just your guys,” he said. “The kids say, ‘Hey, this is my town. I want to leave my mark. I want everybody talking about my senior class in 10 years.’”

You gotta believe

The other key ingredient for public schools is belief. While some public schools can get psyched out by the tradition of a Cardinal Mooney or a Cleveland St. Ignatius, the best ones aren’t afraid.

That’s how Coldwater managed to beat Mooney in two state title games in the last decade and how both Canfield and Poland beat Watterson during their recent runs.

“I’m sure a lot of people did not believe we’d get past Bishop Watterson [in the 2005 second round],” Pavlansky said, “but our guys did.”

Said Hulea, “I’ve always been silly this way as a coach, but if we were playing the New England Patriots this week, I’d just assume we were gonna win. I always think we’re going to win. I’ve always thought it was a good thing when you have high expectations.”

Ursuline coach Larry Kempe was an assistant coach when the Irish won three straight state titles from 2008-10, but he also spent two decades as an assistant at Niles.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Kempe said the Red Dragons lost a lot of players to JFK. But things changed under Bill Bohren, who led Niles to back-to-back playoff appearances in 1999 and 2000.

“When Bill came in the 1990s, the expectation was to get in the playoffs and contend for a state championship,” said Kempe, a JFK graduate. “And when I was there [at Niles], we played parochial schools. We lined up against Benedictine and Padua.”

Kempe thinks more public schools should take that approach. While Ursuline has no choice but to play a tough schedule — good luck getting an All-American Conference or Inter Tri-County League team to play the Irish — he thinks it pays off in November and December when his team is competing against teams used to playing a Division V schedule.

“I don’t apologize for our schedule,” said Kempe, whose nine Ohio opponents this year were all against schools in Division IV or higher. “The culture has been created here, not just by me and Dan [Reardon, the previous head coach], but by previous coaches, that we can go against the bigger schools in the state.”

Parochial problems

Kempe is a JFK graduate married to a Niles High graduate who lives in Girard, yet sent his sons Anthony and Paul to Ursuline. He hates when people think his football team is all on scholarship.

“There’s a fallacy that everybody goes here for free,” said Kempe, whose son Paul quarterbacked the Irish to the three titles. “I know for a fact that I paid tuition and my son was a pretty doggone good football player here. That doesn’t hold an ounce of water with me.”

Kempe also bristles at the accusation that Ursuline recruits the area’s best middle schoolers — as one coach put it, “They go after the athlete and ignore the mathlete” — saying a student must first contact the school’s office before he can talk to him.

“It’s a parental decision where to send your child,” Kempe said. “I don’t understand the philosophy that we go out and hand-pick these talents because it just doesn’t exist.”

Hake is one of the few public school coaches willing to challenge that statement (on the record, anyway) but after getting in hot water for his comments to this newspaper after the OHSAA’s competitive balance referendum passed in May, he’s (mostly) sitting out this round.

“These are murky waters we’re diving in,” he said. “I think [Mooney’s] P.J. Fecko and Kempe are good coaches. And I don’t hate the parochial schools. I just think we’re in a very flawed system.”

Here’s the bottom line

No amount of tweaking can change this fundamental truth: It’s very hard to win a state title, which most coaches agree is the No. 1 reason for the 15-year drought.

“Honest to God, I don’t think people understand how hard it is to do it,” Hake said. “I think parochial schools and the way some of them operate is part of it, but a lot of it has to do with just not being good enough. We’ve been close, but some of the schools just aren’t there.”

Hubbard learned that the last two years when it lost to eventual state champion St. Vincent-St. Mary by a combined score of 94-21. Poland gave Mooney its toughest test of the 2009 playoffs but still lost 24-7. And Pavlansky believes Canfield was good enough to make a run in both 2002 (when the Cardinals tripped against Howland in the second round) and 2004 (when they gave eventual champion Brookhaven its biggest challenge).

But some teams, like Canfield in 2005, have been good enough. Still, the best teams have to get a little lucky (Coldwater’s two wins over Mooney came when the Cardinals were missing their starting quarterback) and they have to stay healthy (which doomed Canfield when Babbaro suffered a knee injury in the second quarter while leading 14-3).

“Hubbard is really good and on paper they certainly have all the pieces, but it’s a new season,” Pavlansky said. “Once you start playing on Friday nights in the playoffs, it’s not always the best team that wins. It’s the team that plays better that night.”