Staff photo / Preston Byers Leetonia players gets set for a field goal during practice on Wednesday in Leetonia.

LEETONIA — The drive from Leetonia to the Northwestern Ohio village of Vanlue is a long one – nearly three hours, to be exact.

So when the Leetonia high school football team set off for Vanlue last Thursday for the first game of the season, the Bears and their head coach, Matt Altomare, were hopeful that the 320-mile round-trip would not be in vain.

And for the first time in more than three years, their hopes were realized.

The Bears, who had lost 30 games in a row – three full seasons’ worth – crushed the Wildcats 47-0. The result, while welcomed, was so lopsided, though, that Leetonia triggered a running clock in the second half, which meant that the Bears, who often found themselves on the wrong end of the running clock, would have to go at least another week to play a traditional, full-length game.

“One thing that we didn’t accomplish last week, which was a good thing, was – out of our long losing streak, we didn’t have a lot of competitive four-quarter games,” Altomare said. “Since the state went to a 30-point rule in the second half, we really haven’t played a lot of those.”

Regardless, the abbreviated win made Leetonia possibly the first high school football team in the entire state to start 1-0; in hopes of being the first game to kick off in Ohio, Leetonia and Vanlue began their game on Thursday at 5:55 p.m. after hearing some teams had planned for a 6 p.m. kickoff.

With the early start time and the running clock, Leetonia, in a normal week, would have been home well before some local games even finished. However, after the win, the Bears piled onto their bus and made the three-hour trek back home.

When they arrived at the high school past midnight, the village of fewer than 2,000 welcomed the team like heroes returning from battle, cheering and honking their car horns in celebration.

“It shows you that the community cares, regardless of if we win or lose,” senior lineman Mike Mango said. “We’ve been in that losing streak for so long now, but it’s great to see that everyone came out and appreciated it.”

For Mango, who had never won a game in his high school career before, the victory had extra meaning.

His grandfather coached at Leetonia “for, like, a really long time,” and two of his uncles and his father played for the Bears as well, with championship plaques hanging in the school to prove it.

“It’s really important to me because I got blood in it,” Mango said. “I mean, half of my family is basically a part of this school. It’s just, I want to make them proud a little bit.”

Matt Altomare knows that feeling, too.

His father, Artie Altomare, coached Leetonia from 1976 to 1995, and, after a three-year hiatus, returned for eight more seasons at the helm of the Bears. In his nearly 30 years at Leetonia, Artie Altomare won more than 150 games and seven league titles and reached the playoffs three times before handing off the program to his son.

In 2007, Matt Altomare won a share of the conference title and led the Bears to the playoffs in his first season. He took Leetonia back to the postseason the next year while winning eight games, which remains the program’s highest single-season win total since.

Following four years as Lisbon’s head coach, Matt Altomare, a 1995 graduate of Leetonia, came back home to be the Bears’ head coach in January 2024. At the time, he said returning was “the move that had to be made,” with his children being students and himself a teacher in the district.

“Every time I step foot in the school doors, I want to be the best teacher I can be. And every time I step foot on this field here, I want to be the best coach I can be. Personally, I’m driven that way,” Matt Altomare said. “But I do have a lot of pride in the community. I believe my son, who’s in seventh grade, will be the fourth generation to graduate from here over the course of about 100 years. So there’s a lot of pride, and it runs deep, there’s no doubt about that.”

Winning last Thursday, Altomare readily admitted, was like a “weight’s been lifted off these kids’ shoulders.” And, possibly more importantly, it served as proof of concept.

“All of a sudden, all the yelling and the hard work and the sweat, it gave the kids validation that, ‘OK, you know what? This can happen if we do what we’re supposed to do,'” Altomare said.

“Whether they do a good job in a weight room or get a win on a Thursday night,” he continued, “or just have some success, all of a sudden, our shoulders get a little bit higher, our chins come up a little bit higher. And that’s really what I want to see as a coach… We’re trying to turn them into young men, and they’re proud of what they’ve done.”

Unlike the previous 30 weeks in the fall, Leetonia did not need a ‘better luck next time’ speech. Instead, Altomare cautioned against flying too high, telling his team to “take a deep breath” and to remember the season is only just beginning.

Altomare also knew that Monday – the first day of school – would arrive soon enough and bring his players down to Earth.

“Monday was rough,” senior linemen Jaden Rivers said. “Only going to school, but we got a lot of praise from our teachers, peers, stuff like that. It was pretty nice. But the only downfall was school.”

As a result, Altomare expected that Monday would be a rough few hours for his team on the practice field.

“In 28 years of coaching and however long I’ve been around football – 40 years here – traditionally, your first day of school practices are horrible. I mean, they just stink. And I said to my dad – he’s got way more coaching years than I do – coming off the field on Monday. I’m like, ‘Holy moly.’ I said, ‘I think this is the best first-day-of-school practice that we’ve ever had.'”

Rivers said that early in the week, the team did get “a little too comfortable” before they “kind of talked sense into each other,” which helped set the tone for the remainder of the preparation for Mathews (0-1), which visits Leetonia tonight.

“Just because we won one doesn’t mean we’re gonna win them all. But that also doesn’t mean we won’t win them all,” Rivers said. “So we got comfortable, but that was just because we were all very happy that we won. And then the end of Monday came, and we all got it in our heads that we still have to walk in and get that mindset we had that first week.”