Kearney recounts career for Warren HOF guests
By Gary Housteau
WARREN
One of the big events that the Warren Sports Hall of Fame puts on annually is Pigskin Preview which showcases the Trumbull County head football coaches. This year’s edition featured Warren’s George Kearney as the guest speaker.
“I’m retired from coaching and I’m flattered greatly that they asked me to come and be the guest speaker,” Kearney said.
A 1967 graduate of Warren Harding, one of the more fascinating things that occurred in Kearney’s lengthy coaching career was being a graduate assistant under Don James at Kent State.
“It was incredible,” Kearney said. “Don James was such a super boss and he did such a great job preparing everyone for their next step in their careers.”
Kearney received a scholarship to Central Michigan but injuries forced him to transfer to and graduate from Kent State. He then accepted a graduate assistant position where he teamed with Dom Capers, Gary Pinkel and Nick Saban in similar GA positions.
“We all wanted to eventually become head coaches,” Kearney said. “And again Don James did such a good job of prepping everybody that of the 13 coaches, nine of them became head coaches at one level or another.
“Dom is the same guy today that he was then. Gary Pinkel’s the same guy. Nick is Nick, you just take him with a grain of salt.
“But one thing I would tell anybody, Nick Saban is one fine football coach, there’s no ifs, ands, buts or maybes. Just sometimes he might leave a little more than you would like as far as personality or lack there of. That was Nick.”
Of course they had their GA battles.
“Pinkel and I were on the offensive side and Nick and Dom were on the defensive side,” Kearney said. “And we’d kind of go at each other when we’d go into JV games.
“There’s a lot of tremendous memories but what made it even better was some of the people we had at that point in time. We had a great kid from Youngstown, Walt Vrabel who was from Campbell Memorial.”
Kearney coached teams from peewee to pro and the stories continued along with the quips that came with them when he addressed the audience. But the one thing that Kearney admitted that he was most proud of during his career was his personal relationships with his players.
“Hopefully the kids that I coached be it from the Little Tigers in Howland to pro ball, I used to always tell my players, ‘once you play for me you’re one of my guys, and if you ever need anything you call me up and I’ll be there,’” Kearney said.
“And some of those kids, a lot of them, have taken me up on that. Just that, I think, is important, that those kids know that you cared about them and you were interested in their well being, more than just on the field.”
When Kearney stepped down from the podium, as many as eight of the head football coaches in attendance gave the audience a quick state of their team address. From two ends of the spectrum there was the veteran Bill Bohren from Southington to the youthful Josh Franke from Newton Falls.
Franke, 29, is in his sixth year now as a head coach and his second year at Falls and has the quite the head start on chasing Bohren’s longevity of 48 years in the head coaching business.
A graduate of Toronto High School in the Steubenville area, Franke got his first head job in a small school in Virginia at 24 and then he went to Ashtabula Edgewood for two years before taking over the helm of the Tigers program.
“Here we are in the Trumbull County area and football is king here so it’s almost like being home,” Franke said. “They value football here just as much as home does so it’s great to be in a place like this.”
It’s still very much a learning process for Franke who went 0-10 in his first year at Falls last season.
“Bohren, on the other hand, has already been through the whole coaching gamut and continues to prod on.
“He’s a great guy, I sat at his table tonight,” Franke said. “Somebody that has been fortunate enough to be a coach for the number of years he has is something that a younger coach like myself hopes and wishes that I can get to be his age and still coach in the game. He’s a very fortunate person.”
It’s just a lifelong passion for Bohren.
“I just enjoy it,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything like Friday nights. Friday nights is what you really live for.”
The beginnings for both coaches are ironically pretty similar.
“When I was a GA I decided I was going to coach and I got a job at a small school, Ohio Illinois, and I was head football and head basketball coach,” Bohren said. “I got an offer for a football job at a real good school in Spring Valley, Illinois.”
Bohren spent two years at Ohio Illinois and then went to Spring Valley Hall for four years and then he came to Ohio and coached and Ottawa Glandorf and then Steubenville Big Red and the list goes on and on.