Staff photo / Preston Byers Grand Valley head football coach Matt Rosati directs his team during practice Wednesday in Orwell.

ORWELL — Before the season, incoming Grand Valley head football coach Matt Rosati spoke about numbers.

Last year, he said the Mustangs finished with fewer than 20 players. By the time they began practice for the 2025 season, Rosati counted nearly 50 on his roster.

But that’s not the number people around Orwell are most excited about. They’re more focused on the number two – how many wins the Mustangs have earned already.

“Everybody’s very excited … people have been very, very supportive, and very excited about what we’ve been able to accomplish so far,” Rosati said.

It’s not every year Grand Valley starts 2-0. In fact, the ‘Stangs had not even started 1-0 in any of the six seasons preceding Rosati’s arrival.

From 2019 to 2024, Grand Valley went 0-6 in its season openers and were outscored 232 to 82 in those games.

Two weeks ago, the 2025 Mustangs ended that losing streak in emphatic fashion by blowing out Brooklyn on the road 54-22. Last week, GV secured its first 2-0 start since 2018, when the Mustangs won their first three games en route to a 7-3 season.

Win number two was a lot tougher, though, than number one.

Unlike Week 1, when Grand Valley led 42-16 at halftime and could cruise through the second half, the Mustangs returned to the locker room in Ravenna last week down 14-13 to Southeast.

In past years, GV might have headed back to Orwell with a bitter loss. But last week, over the final 24 minutes, the Mustangs shut out the Pirates 12-0 to return home with their second win in as many weeks.

“A lot of it is a mentality thing,” Rosati said. “A lot of these kids… they’ve won three football games in their entire career, so they get super excited when things are going well and then lose focus, and you have to bring them back to reality. And being in a close game was good, but we didn’t panic at all in any way, shape or form. We just have to do what we do and play better, and we did.”

A major factor in the win, Rosati said, were Grand Valley’s numbers.

Rosati said he has 46 players at his disposal, about two-and-a-half times as many as GV had by November 2024. And the veteran coach uses that to his advantage.

Unlike many teams they face, including Southeast, the Mustangs do not deploy many players on both offense and defense, which allows most of Rosati’s team to rest while their opponents wear down. Rosati said he could sense that a week ago at halftime in Ravenna, just before GV pitched its second-half shutout.

For that reason, the win against Southeast was as much about the players’ efforts Friday evening as it was about Rosati’s efforts since his hiring in December.

Rosati came to GV from West Geauga, where he established himself as the winningest coach in program history over a period of 15 years between two stints, during which he led the Wolverines to their first playoff appearance and postseason victory.

While he will not achieve either of those feats with Grand Valley – the Mustangs have reached the playoffs eight times and earned their lone win back in 1997 – Rosati was hired with the hopes that he could add to the program’s history.

“I knew there were some good kids in the school, and traditionally, it’s been a good football community,” Rosati said. “I just wanted to see if I could try to draw some more kids out to play.”

The new football coach said he “scrounged the halls” in search of some potential football players. Rosati also credited strength and conditioning coach Mark Gray Jr., who “did a tremendous job getting guys to come out and actually start lifting weights and doing things together as a team.”

“The numbers just grew and grew and grew,” Rosati said.

One of the new arrivals was Luke Giddings, a junior transfer from Pymatuning Valley who has quickly established himself as one of Grand Valley’s best players – and one of the only two-way players.

Giddings admits he did not know what to expect when he transferred.

“I didn’t know the coach, I didn’t really know how they played,” Giddings said. “I know we played last year and beat them. So I didn’t know how it was going to go this year. But it seems like we’re doing pretty good so far.”

Giddings was quick to point to the Mustangs’ coaching as to why they’re 2-0 this season. And he said his new teammates have provided insight into just how different things are this year compared to years past.

“There’s been a lot of work that got put in over the summer,” Giddings said. “Just things that you got to be more strict on and just making people focus more instead of just screwing off at practice and actually getting stuff done.

“They said they pretty much did whatever they wanted, they screwed off half the practice,” he added. “And that was probably also the reason they were 1-9 last year. This year, the coaching’s been different, everything’s been strict, certain times, things had to be done a certain way, and I think it’s shown on the field already.”

A running back in GV’s offense, Giddings scored three times in the Mustangs’ season opener and caught the go-ahead touchdown pass from quarterback Nate Stewart en route to GV’s win over Southeast.

But his most important role may be on the defensive side, where, as middle linebacker, he calls out plays and formations and anchors an otherwise young and inexperienced front.

That front will face a tough test tonight when it is tasked with stopping McDonald’s Wing-T offense, which produced a 7-4 Blue Devils campaign and playoff appearance in 2024 after three straight losing seasons while running the spread.

“It is a unique offense,” Rosati said. “A lot of people do run the Wing-T, but all variations are different. They’re very true to what they do. So in some respects, that’s good. In some respects it’s not so good because they’re so good at what they do. We like to think that we have an idea of what’s coming. But you don’t know until you actually line up and deal with it because you can’t simulate it in practice.”

Throughout the week, Rosati said that he and his coaching staff tried to teach the young defenders as much as possible about the deceptive offense, particularly in reading their keys and remaining disciplined.

But the veteran coach said whether they actually do that is the “big question.”

“In the heat of the moment, you never know,” Rosati said. “So you better have some athletes. You better have some guys that can play, and we have some guys that can play. Even though a lot of them are young, we have some guys that can play.

“We want to try to make McDonald – and anybody we play – have to adjust to what we do, and not so much that we have to adjust to what they do.”