Chardon Won Title With Heart Behind Motivating Coach
The name of the school yearbook says it best: A Picture Perfect Year.
It was this month 20 years ago that the Chardon Hilltoppers won Geauga County’s first and only state championship, a 17-6 win over Buckeye Local.
The Div. II game was played in front of 10,000 fans at Paul Brown Tiger Stadium, and the roots of that team are still deeply planted in the current program.
A stone-wall defense and two touchdowns by Eric Ash carried Chardon that Dec. 2 night. At 160 pounds, Ash, a senior whose twin brother, Kevin, was on the team, was the smallest back in a backfield and ran for 292 yards that day.
He still coaches his sons in the Chardon Youth Football league. He remembers what good friends the team was off the field.
“We took care of our underclassmen,” he said. “Just growing up with each other, and we always knew the other person was going to do their job.”
As incredible as 1994 was, fans may forget that the 14-0 seniors were 0-10 as sophomores. From worst to first.
“The next year we came back and nobody gave us any respect at all,” Ash said. His junior year, the team went 9-4 to the State Final Four.
“After that year, we just didn’t want to lose anymore,” Ash said.
The master motivator and leader of these men never much liked to lose.
‘We Used to Bring a Doormat With Us’
Head coach Bob Doyle inherited a Chardon program that had endured mostly losses in the 1970s, including a 29-game losing streak.
Doyle took over in 1979, and on Sept. 12, 1980, the streak was broken.
“We used to bring a doormat with us,” said Doyle. “After that win we burned that doormat at the 50-yard line.”
Bill Overton was an offensive line and linebacker coach who was on the staff before Doyle arrived.
“It was so bad,” Overton remembers of the ‘70s, “that a local newspaper reported we only had 20 wins in the entire decade. We had lost some great players, and it was hard to recover.”
Overton went to Doyle, who had been running a split-veer offense, and wanted to change to a Delaware Wing-T.
“Bill came into my living room and said, ‘You have to watch this film,’” Doyle remembers. “He said, ‘If you can do that in college, you can sure do that in high school.’ That really impacted the program, hiding the ball, running out fakes. That did a lot toward equalizing the playing field.”
But Overton wants no credit. In his quick, curt tone, Overton began his views on the 1994 team this way: “There’s no doubt about this — without Bob Doyle this would have never happened. There is no doubt about that.”
Changes
Chardon started its climb to the top under Doyle in the weight room, and on the city’s many hills, training harder than high schoolers had ever trained before.
Doyle’s involvement with the athletic weight-training company Bigger Faster Stronger, which started in 1987, continues today.
Geoff DelGrosso, a 165-pound left guard in 1994, remembers those workouts and what teammates were willing to do to get inside a weight room.
“That was our home,” DelGrosso said of the high school’s “crappy little weight room.” He now owns Titans Gym, with three locations in Northeast Ohio. “Even when school wasn’t open, we wanted to lift. We used to break into the weight room by taking the hinges off the doors, taking the framing off through the plexiglass window.”
The day after the 1993 season ended, DelGrosso and teammates began running the old skill hill in Chardon. “It was the whole class,” he said.
“As kids you don’t really know what you’re capable of, but coach Doyle was a driving force in every person’s life. He knew how to get the best out of what we had. He gathered us together, and we were going to be something special.”
And they were.
The Big Year
With the Wing-T and the training, it was Doyle’s motivation that put it all together.
“We had good players, but a lot of the teams that we played had great players,” Doyle said. “They were a very committed group. It takes a special group of players, and they were extremely unselfish, like a family and a brotherhood.”
The team’s defense decided before that season that it would not allow a rushing TD. It held true to its word until the last minute of the 10th game, against West Geauga, when a QB draw crossed the goal line to tie the game.
But with 22 seconds left, Chardon, led by quarterback Scot Neill, went 78 yards for the win. Chardon had the ball on the 1-yard line, but told coaches it did not want to kick the field goal. “They did it,” Doyle said. To finish 10-0.
In the playoffs, Chardon faced four tailbacks who had run for 5,000 yards throughout the season, Doyle remem-bers. And yet the backs mustered just 300 total yards between them.
“They played with technique and great heart,” Doyle said.
A Wing-T and rugged defense seem to suit Chardon kids.
“Some things seem to fit like a glove,” the coach said.
Overton remembers a team of almost no flaws.
“For me, personally,” Overton said, “I was worried I couldn’t keep up with them. Those players were adept, so smart, had such high expectations, I wanted to make sure I was on the ball with them.”
Today
The 1994 team still keeps in touch, sending an email every Dec. 2 on the anniversary.
Korey Rice sends it out. He didn’t want to share this year’s because it’s “mostly just reflections, inside jokes, and a little ribbing of my friends,” he said.
“I will tell you that every year, one message is the same,” he wrote in an email. “After the championship game 20 years ago, Coach Doyle said something that I didn’t expect in his post-game speech. Of course he praised our accomplishment, but he also said, ‘Don’t let this be the greatest thing you ever do.’
“That quote has rung in my ears for years. In my message, I remind my teammates of that quote, and I tell them to look back for that one day every year, but to look forward for the rest.”
The Chardon principles of 20 years ago still stand today. Current head coach Mitch Hewitt is a 1999 graduate who played on a state-runner up team in 1998.
The Hilltoppers run more of a pistol formation, which is a variation on the single-wing, Doyle said. Like the 1994 Chardon team, the 2014 players played mostly two ways.
Doyle didn’t hesitate when asked if Chardon, now Div. III, could win another state championship.
“When my son went and played at Navy,” Doyle said, “they confirmed my whole belief in the importance of attitude. Our kids had great attitudes. There aren’t many places you can go and find kids playing tackle football outside the school. You have good, tough, solid, rugged kids.
“When you have the right attitude, there’s a lot you can accomplish.”
Doyle’s message is also the same: If you believe, you can achieve.
He tells kids, “What does a middle linebacker on a state championship team look like? How about Andy Hoenigman, 5-6 and 159 pounds.”
Ash is using that same message for his sons, Alex, who is 7, and 10-year-old Evan.
“I tell my boys and the whole team that size doesn’t matter. As long as you have it upstairs in your head.”
