Staff photo / Preston Byers. A signed Cleveland Browns helmet sits on a stool during the Warren Football Legends dinner on Saturday at Trumbull Country Club.

WARREN — The Warren Football Legends dinner returned to the Trumbull Country Club for its ninth annual event Saturday evening.

Featuring a celebration of former Warren football players and headlined by a panel composed of current and former Cleveland Browns beat writers, the dinner brought together members of the community with the stated goals of raising money for Harding football and unifying a community once divided between two rival high schools.

“I left before the school split [into Harding and Western Reserve],” event host and panel moderator Ray Yannucci said. “What I heard back then was not very — it was a war, and there was a lot of bad blood, and I think there’s probably still a little bit. So things like this can help bridge that. It really can, because we’re honoring the Harding Panthers, the Warren Western Reserve Raiders and the Harding Raiders. We’re trying to bring people together. Let’s not dwell on the past. I think Coach [Matt] Richardson’s built a really good program here. I could see that coming. So I think this helps unite the community, which is what we try to do.”

About a decade ago, current Warren Gridiron Club Chairperson Virginia Holmes suggested an event to honor Warren’s numerous football legends. Holmes approached Paul Warfield, who Yannucci, a close friend and former high school teammate, proclaimed Saturday was the unequivocal best player to ever come from the Mahoning Valley.

Warfield, a Pro Football Hall of Famer, was born in raised in Warren and starred at Harding and then Ohio State before winning one NFL championship and two Super Bowls, in addition to earning eight Pro Bowl selections, during a 14-year professional career spent between the Cleveland Browns, Miami Dolphins and Memphis Southmen of the short-lived World Football League.

After Holmes spoke to Warfield, the football legend reached out to Yannucci and asked for his help in organizing the event Holmes envisioned. With the exception of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic prevented a gathering, the dinner and next-day golf outing have been annual fixtures at the Trumbull Country Club. Warfield was scheduled to attend on Saturday but could not make it, Yannucci said, because he and his wife are in the process of moving in California.

Yannucci said that over the years, the weekend event has raised around $280,000, a good chunk of which has been a result of ‘premier’ sponsorships from local businesses and community members, which were displayed during Saturday’s dinner with banners and large pieces of paper placed around the clubhouse.

A calling card of the event is a themed panel, often made up of sportspeople with connections to the Valley, Northeast Ohio or Western Pennsylvania.

“I try to get a different theme every year. It’s getting harder and harder,” Yannucci said. “We’ve had Ohio State-Michigan. We’ve had the Raiders against the Panthers. We’ve had the Browns and the Steelers. Matter of fact, one year we had Franco Harris and Mel Blount, two Hall of Famers, along with Greg Pruitt. And Paul [Warfield] was here at the time. We had the Browner brothers (Warren Western Reserve products) one time. So we try to get a theme. But to tell you the truth, it’s getting harder and harder.”

This year’s panel theme was “145 Years of Cleveland Browns Media,” and it featured Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com’s Browns beat writer Mary Kay Cabot and former beat writer and Akron Beacon Journal columnist Marla Ridenour. ESPN’s Cleveland’s Tony Grossi was also scheduled to participate but missed the event due to illness, Yannucci said.

Cabot and Ridenour, as well as Yannucci, a former Browns beat writer and former owner of Browns News/Illustrated, spoke on their experiences and opinions of various Browns topics, including the proposed new stadium in Brook Park, Shedeur Sanders’ draft choice and recent speeding tickets and Nick Chubb’s departure. They also discussed their experiences with former Browns head coach and current University of North Carolina coach Bill Belichick, as well as their reaction to the Steelers signing Aaron Rodgers.

Before the panel, all former Warren football players were asked to walk to the front of the room. Most spoke, giving a brief summary of their background and accomplishments, and some endorsed the work Richardson had done in the 18 or so months since he was hired at Harding.

Among those in attendance were Kay’Ron Lynch-Adams, a 2019 Harding graduate who signed with the Carolina Panthers as an undrafted free agent last month, and Dan “Boom” Herron, a 2007 Harding alumnus who starred at Ohio State before being drafted in the sixth round in 2012. He played for the Cincinnati Bengals, Indianapolis Colts and Buffalo Bills during his NFL career.

To cap off the celebration of the football legends, Richardson, a Warren JFK graduate and the second-year Harding head football coach, took the microphone, thanked boosters and school and athletic administrators and shouted out several current coaches in attendance, as well as former Harding coach Thom McDaniels, Richardson’s career-long mentor who hired him to be a part of McDaniels’ inaugural Raiders staff.

In line with the expectations met during Daniels’ much-lauded tenure, Richardson finished his speech by laying out his and the program’s goals as he enters Year 2.

“Very excited about the new year,” he said. “I think the honeymoon period is over, and the kids kind of know where we’re coming from. We felt like we had a pretty good year last year, but we would like to put out a better product for Warren football.

“We’re bigger, faster, stronger, and we haven’t beat McKinley since 2016, so that’s all I’m focused on right now. If you are from Warren, we play for state titles. … If you’re in the game of coaching, you ain’t just coaching to win games. We want to win a title, so we’re going from the position of just showing up and being respectable to now, we want to kick some people’s [butts].”