Columbiana County series will go dormant

By Brian Dzenis

bdzenis@vindy.com

COLUMBIANA

Columbiana week is a special time at Crestview High School. For Rebels wideout Ty Fitzsimmons, practice is a little more intense. School is a little more intense. The tension builds all the way until their Friday night meeting with the Clippers.

“Going against the Clippers, they’re right down the road so you know every kid,” Fitsimmons said. “You wish you could play them all the time.”

It appears that won’t be the case after tonight’s contest at Crestview High School. It looks like the first casualty of the Inter-Tri County League’s breakup earlier this year is the annual rivalry game between two schools separated by four miles.

When the ITCL broke up, 14 teams became members of either the Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference or the Eastern Ohio Athletic Conference — Columbiana’s new home. Crestview and South Range were left without a league.

The head coaches on both sides, Columbiana’s Bob Spaite and Crestview’s Paul Cusick, are in agreement that they didn’t want to see the 16-team league break up. Why they can’t continue to play each other as non-conference opponents, Spaite points the finger at Crestview.

“It’s a shame. I have a standing offer to play them. When this league fell apart, I called and emailed [Cusick] and I said, ‘Hey listen, I want to keep it going. Sorry about not being invited to the new league, but we want to keep you on the schedule,’” Spaite said. “His response was that they wanted to take a ‘cooling-off period.’

“What he needs to cool off from? I’m not sure, but I respect their decision. We’re more than willing to play. It is definitely their choice not to continue the series.”

From Cusick’s point of view, Columbiana — any ITCL school for that matter — can’t have it both ways. The the soon-to-be ex-ITCL schools can’t freeze the Rebels out of a league and expect to keep them as opponents.

“I don’t think our school or community took it very lightly on how we were pushed out of the league,” said Cusick, who is also the school’s co-athletic director. “I just feel that if it’s a situation where they don’t want us in a league, I’m not sure I want my kids playing them and not understanding why they don’t want us in a league.”

Cusick said he is open to the idea of resuming the series, but didn’t give a time frame for the “cooling-off period.”

“The community wants that game played and I’m sure both communities want this game to be played,” Cusick said. “The schools are right next to each other. There’s a lot of rivalry, but the bottom line is we should be in the same league and what happened is not right and I stand by that.”

Despite the Columbiana program being 100 years old and Crestview’s stretching back to the 1950s, the series will go dormant after just 26 games.

For the longest time, Crestview and Columbiana had a sizable gap in quality for football and were part of different leagues. From 1961 to 1986, the Rebels had just two winning seasons. Spaite played for one of those winning teams in 1971.

“I’ll never forget being the head coach at Southern Local in [1977] and seeing John Gecina named Coach of the Year because he went 5-5 with a Crestview team that had 19 kids on it,” Spaite said.

In the dark years at Crestview, the Rebels were not a priority to put on the Clippers’ schedule.

“Crestview just didn’t have a good football team until 1991 and we had three rivalry games that were all trophy games: Leetonia, Lisbon and East Palestine,” said Crestview defensive coordinator Lowell Bacon, who was Columbiana’s head coach from 1988-93. “When you take those three games and then league play, those are the only games you have.”

Former coach Tom Sapp brought the Rebels back to respectability in the late 1980s and when both teams became members of the old Inter-County League in 1991, they finally met on the field.

“Right away it was a rivalry,” said Cusick, who was an assistant coach under Bacon. “It was something everybody wanted for years.”

Crestview leads the series 18-7 heading into tonight. Columbiana hasn’t defeated Crestview since 2008. The Clippers haven’t won a road game against Crestview since 2003.

“In the early years, it was back and forth. It was pretty even then,” Spaite said. “Since ’07-08, they’ve been on this tear for the last 10 years. They’ve had the advantage, like Army and Navy or Michigan and Ohio State.”

If this is to be the end of the rivalry, it will come at a time when both teams are playing at a high level. Columbiana came out on top of a Week 1 shootout with Western Reserve, 63-52. Clippers quarterback Mitch Davidson put up 317 combined passing and rushing yards and seven touchdowns. Last year, Crestview was the only team that could outgun the Clippers and no one in the Rebels’ camp is suggesting they can shut down Davidson, just contain him.

“He’s an experienced player who has seen all kinds of defenses, so you’re not going to trick him or fool him,” Cusick said. “You just try to limit the number of big plays that he gets and hopefully you can capitalize on the plays that you get and find the end zone.”

Crestview’s offense is no slouch. The Rebels rolled Collinwood, 55-14 and five different players scored a rushing touchdown. Quarterback Caleb Hill ran for three touchdowns and passed to Fitzsimmons for another one. The offense is running just fine without a back taking all of the carries like the graduated Zach Hicks.

“We just split the carries and let things fall as it may,” Cusick said. “We basically rotate every series and if somebody gets hot, you go with them, but for now, you just rotate every series.”

Columbiana’s defense wants to redeem itself after conceding 52 points last week.

“Western Reserve obviously is a good team, but I would like to see us play better on defense, because no one wants to give up that many points,” Clippers defensive end Keenan Green said. “Not to take anything away from them — we just did not play to our potential.”

Columbiana and Crestview have close ties from the coaches having played or coached for the other side to both rosters’ familiarity with each other. An uncertain future awaits.

“I’m going to miss it. I think in a lot of ways, it’s a healthy thing for the community, but it’s like life. Good things come into it and then they leave and other things replace them,” Bacon said. “Everybody is going to miss it, but that’s the way it went. I don’t usually look back because when I look around and look back, I tend to run into things, so I just look forward.”