High school football traditions still strong in Trumbull County
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"It just means more."
The slogan is often associated with the Southeastern Conference (SEC), of which it is a registered trademark, but it seems all too fitting for the Mahoning Valley, and specifically, for Trumbull County football.
For generations across America, Friday nights in the fall have been when sleepy towns awake and gather to watch teenage boys wage battle on the gridiron. Trumbull County is no different. But to many, it's better.
"I’ve been everywhere," said David "Worm" Baugh, a Warren G. Harding alumnus and one of the most fervent supporters of the Raiders football program. "I’ve been in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Lima. ... I don’t think there’s nothing like Harding football."
But it's not just Warren and it's not just Harding.
"This area just picks up on high school football," said Steve Ruman, a Tribune Chronicle correspondent and Niles native who attended Warren JFK. "For almost every community, on a Friday night, that’s the go-to. The communities fall in love with it, and the media just kind of picks up on that and runs with it. But you talk to people in other other regions of the country... and they’re always amazed at the passion that exists for high school football around here."
Travel 10 or 15 minutes in any direction in Trumbull County and you'll likely find a different high school, with different traditions and different rivalries, but they almost certainly have a similar passion for football.
"I don’t know if there’s one main reason," Ruman said. "I just think a lot of people, they associate their communities with that football program for whatever reason, and the way that football program kind of is, I guess, a representation of their community."
Girard head football coach Pat Pearson certainly feels that way.
A product of the Girard school district, Pearson has been the head coach of the Indians' football program for a decade and a member of the coaching staff for even longer.
So he understands the role his team plays in the community.
"When the stadium is full and buzzing, it gives everybody something to cheer about and be proud about," Pearson said. "And our kids take that, really highly. Our kids really -- there’s a sense of responsibility there.
"One of our big sayings we talk about, we honor the past, live for the present and build for the future. And that’s what our kids -- on a Friday night, they know what’s been done before them, and they know how many little eyes are looking on them for the future. They want to make their mark every Friday night."
Like Pearson, Brian Hoffman has had the opportunity to take in Friday nights as a player and a coach in his hometown, something he could only dream of when he was a child going to games with his father.
"As you were coming up, you’d always talk to your buddies about when we got our chance to play on Friday night and have that experience," said Hoffman, who graduated from Hubbard in 1989 and has been the head coach of the Eagles since 2007.
Some never got the chance to strap on the helmet and become a modern-day gladiator, though.
Involved in a car crash when he was a child and never the tallest guy, Baugh was forbidden to play football by his mother. Instead, Baugh often took a short walk from his uncle's house to attend Harding home games with his older cousin. But when his cousin did not go to the games, neither could Baugh.
"I told myself, when I got older, I wouldn’t miss a football game for anything," Baugh said.
He's kept his promise.
Rain or shine, home or away, Baugh -- self-identifying as the "very loud guy" in the stadium -- will be there, just as he has been for every Harding football contest since 1997.
Even before Baugh began dreaming of never missing Harding games, the traditions and rivalries that many have come to know and love -- or hate -- were just getting started in Trumbull County.
"I was born in the '60s, so I caught the tailend of the whole Niles football era and what they accomplished in '60s," Ruman said. "In the early '70s, Niles football was the centerpiece of the town."
Niles, unlike many of the other local teams, eschewed Friday night and established its own tradition of Saturday-night home games.
"It was the only game in town back then," Ruman said. "Even in the early '70s, you were looking at like 10,000 people at - at the time, it was Riverside Stadium - every Saturday night."
For many years, Niles was also a part of one of the biggest rivalries, against Warren Harding. However, Harding soon found itself at the center of an even bigger, even more local feud.
"There is nothing that compares to the Warren Harding-Warren Western Reserve rivalry back in the late '70s," Ruman said. "The intensity of that rivalry -- there’s no rivalry today that you can say, 'Oh, that compares to Warren Harding and Warren Western Reserve.' Nothing. It was insane. It was insanely intense."
The two Warren schools, one on the East side and one on the West side, battled it out on the field in a rivalry so heated that the games eventually had to stop being played on Friday nights.
"Toward the end of the rivalry," Ruman said, "they played on Saturday afternoons. And that was just because, I think, to try to curtail some of the after-game mishaps, or whatever you want to call it."
For Hoffman growing up in Hubbard, he remembers a rivalry that has since all but disappeared.
"It's funny. I can honestly say, when I was growing up, our rival was Brookfield," Hoffman said. "I think it had been that way for a long time. ... Basketball, football, baseball, there was a big rivalry between us and Brookfield."
Eventually, things changed.
The Hubbard-Brookfield rivalry withered away, Niles began playing its home games on Friday nights and Warren Harding and Warren Western Reserve combined into Warren G. Harding, which quickly became a football powerhouse that a young Baugh adored.
In 2006, a few years after graduating from Harding alongside the likes of Maurice Clarett and David Herron, Baugh began working for the Tribune as a correspondent. For his first assignment, Baugh, spoiled in some ways by Harding's excellence and high expectations, covered a game between McDonald and Southington, where he would get to witness the unique love for football and Friday nights other communities have.
"I didn’t realize this, but that was Southington's first-ever night game, because it was the first game that they ever had lights," Baugh said. "I guess they bought the old lights from LaBrae. That’s when they had rebuilt LaBrae, so I guess they bought LaBrae's old lights. ... And McDonald just beat them by like, 60-some points or whatever. But when McDonald scored, [Southington's fans] acted like they won the Super Bowl, because they were so happy to be there at night.
"I thought that me being from Harding, even back then -- we got the fireworks, we got the scoreboards, we got the great band, we got the great food, the concessions, the little stuff that we complain about when we don’t have it. They stood and watched their team get slaughtered just because they had lights. I thought that was the most beautiful thing ever."
In the nearly 20 years since that game in Southington, things have continued to change in Trumbull County. And some changes, one may argue, aren't that bad at all.
"It’s funny, because people talk about the '60s and that era being the big era of high school football in the area and all that," Ruman said. "But if you look now, the way it’s covered, it’s almost like 24/7 from August on. ... It seemed like maybe back in the day, the focus was on Niles, Warren Western Reserve and Warren Harding and some of the bigger schools, to where it is now it seems like just every school’s kind of getting recognized and getting their due."
Some things just haven't changed.
Communities like Niles, just as it did years ago, embrace its football team as its own -- because it is.
"There’s a different feel in Niles on a football Friday night, whether they’re playing at home or away," Ruman said. "It just seems like there’s that extra bit of excitement throughout the whole community. And it’s even not just necessarily with football fans, but I think even the typical citizen who might not be a football fan kind of gets wrapped up in that because, again, they’re playing for Niles or representing the community. It’s not just about football. It’s kind of about the kids and those players in the community representing Niles or Warren or Mineral Ridge or whatever the case may be."
And some things, thankfully, will simply never change.
"We start doing pregame at six o’clock and the music’s playing, the band's playing, the popcorn you can smell, people are starting to fill in the stands," Pearson said. "And when you hit that tunnel and run out, man, it’s special.
"That’s what makes high school football, in general, so great. That's what makes the Valley so great -- that these kids, for two, three hours, they’re heroes. They’re superstars."