Time for a little love for the town I grew up in...didn't go to school there but a friend of mine is a MS coach there.
Grandview drops small-town look on football field
Friday, November 04, 2005
Life in a small Ohio town with a playoffbound high-school football team might be as good as it gets in sports. The community spirit is like a relic from the ’50s. It is like living in a Norman Rockwell painting.
Now try to imagine moving that idyllic little football town into the center of the state’s largest city.
Impossible?
That scene describes exactly what is happening in Grandview Heights.
"It’s incredible the way the community has embraced this," Grandview coach Scott Gordon said. "We’ll be out on our practice field and cars are constantly slowing down, and people are honking at us or yelling at us. We’re constantly getting people showing up asking what they can do.
"One of the local restaurants here, the Knotty Pine, has provided us with pregame meals at no charge, all season long. And the guys from the 1987 team (the last Grandview team to make the playoffs) continue to come around and introduce themselves and say, ‘Hey, it’s great to see this happening again.’ "
In this sprawling metropolitan area, Grandview is one of those quaint little places that a lot of us don’t think much about it. It is both suburb and inner city and it is neither; in some ways, it really is a small town.
Houses surround the football field. There is a giant oak tree just beyond the south end zone. The Depression-era stadium, refurbished last year, was built by the WPA. Most of the fans walk to the games.
In a local high-school world dominated by the Dublins, Hilliards and Westervilles and Catholic powers such as Watterson and De-Sales, it isn’t the kind of place you’d expect to find a 9-1 team that is the talk of the neighborhood. And until Gordon and this group of seniors arrived, that part of the picture was ancient history.
When the Bobcats won the Mid-State League’s Cardinal Division championship this year, it was the first football title for Grandview since 1979, when WTVN sportscaster Larry Larson coached the team.
So what changed? A lot of things.
In 2003, Gordon brought a new offense and a new attitude to a program that had posted only one winning season in 15 years. He found all-state quarterback Alex Rouch on the golf team, or rather Rouch found him, and discovered that that sophomore class had the kind of athletes not normally found at a Division V school. And receiver Ben Graves and linebacker Craig Cataline might be good enough to play anywhere.
"There are a lot of similarities between this group and that team we had in ’79," Larson said. "We were carried that year by a wonderful senior class. It was their last hurrah and they took the whole season just that way. This year, you have a senior class that has been successful since junior high and they’ve stayed together and done the same thing."
To that, Gordon added his offense, part of which he learned as a graduate assistant coach at Florida under Steve Spurrier. Gordon got support on refurbishing the old stadium, which he said reminded of him of "a Turkish prison," and made sure the players knew about Grandview’s football tradition, even if he had to go back a way to find it.
Last February, former Grandview star Ralph Gugliemi, an All-American quarterback at Notre Dame, came back for a smoker. Gugliemi was the No. 4 pick in the 1955 NFL draft and an eight-year NFL veteran.
"We kind of had a melding of the old generation and the new generation," Gordon said. "He spoke to all of our players that week about that history and gave them a bridge to the past. It really blew them away. To be honest with you, I think it helped cement in their minds that this isn’t just a place where sports are something to do, that we can have some greatness here."
So it is that Grandview beat Newark Catholic this season — who could have ever seen Grandview beating the seventime state champion Green Wave — and won its first league championship in 26 years. So it is that it travels to Lucasville Valley tonight for its first playoff game in 18 years.
Greatness? Yep.
"What we said when we came in here was, ‘Why not?’ " Gordon said. "Why can’t we compete with the best? Why can’t we be the best? We’ve got everything here. We’ve got really nice facilities. We’ve got an outstanding community with great families. We have a great educational philosophy in the school. We have good athletes. We have everything in place, so why not us?"
No matter what happens from here on out, isn’t it nice they can finally stop asking that question?
Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch .
[email protected]
Grandview drops small-town look on football field
Friday, November 04, 2005
Life in a small Ohio town with a playoffbound high-school football team might be as good as it gets in sports. The community spirit is like a relic from the ’50s. It is like living in a Norman Rockwell painting.
Now try to imagine moving that idyllic little football town into the center of the state’s largest city.
Impossible?
That scene describes exactly what is happening in Grandview Heights.
"It’s incredible the way the community has embraced this," Grandview coach Scott Gordon said. "We’ll be out on our practice field and cars are constantly slowing down, and people are honking at us or yelling at us. We’re constantly getting people showing up asking what they can do.
"One of the local restaurants here, the Knotty Pine, has provided us with pregame meals at no charge, all season long. And the guys from the 1987 team (the last Grandview team to make the playoffs) continue to come around and introduce themselves and say, ‘Hey, it’s great to see this happening again.’ "
In this sprawling metropolitan area, Grandview is one of those quaint little places that a lot of us don’t think much about it. It is both suburb and inner city and it is neither; in some ways, it really is a small town.
Houses surround the football field. There is a giant oak tree just beyond the south end zone. The Depression-era stadium, refurbished last year, was built by the WPA. Most of the fans walk to the games.
In a local high-school world dominated by the Dublins, Hilliards and Westervilles and Catholic powers such as Watterson and De-Sales, it isn’t the kind of place you’d expect to find a 9-1 team that is the talk of the neighborhood. And until Gordon and this group of seniors arrived, that part of the picture was ancient history.
When the Bobcats won the Mid-State League’s Cardinal Division championship this year, it was the first football title for Grandview since 1979, when WTVN sportscaster Larry Larson coached the team.
So what changed? A lot of things.
In 2003, Gordon brought a new offense and a new attitude to a program that had posted only one winning season in 15 years. He found all-state quarterback Alex Rouch on the golf team, or rather Rouch found him, and discovered that that sophomore class had the kind of athletes not normally found at a Division V school. And receiver Ben Graves and linebacker Craig Cataline might be good enough to play anywhere.
"There are a lot of similarities between this group and that team we had in ’79," Larson said. "We were carried that year by a wonderful senior class. It was their last hurrah and they took the whole season just that way. This year, you have a senior class that has been successful since junior high and they’ve stayed together and done the same thing."
To that, Gordon added his offense, part of which he learned as a graduate assistant coach at Florida under Steve Spurrier. Gordon got support on refurbishing the old stadium, which he said reminded of him of "a Turkish prison," and made sure the players knew about Grandview’s football tradition, even if he had to go back a way to find it.
Last February, former Grandview star Ralph Gugliemi, an All-American quarterback at Notre Dame, came back for a smoker. Gugliemi was the No. 4 pick in the 1955 NFL draft and an eight-year NFL veteran.
"We kind of had a melding of the old generation and the new generation," Gordon said. "He spoke to all of our players that week about that history and gave them a bridge to the past. It really blew them away. To be honest with you, I think it helped cement in their minds that this isn’t just a place where sports are something to do, that we can have some greatness here."
So it is that Grandview beat Newark Catholic this season — who could have ever seen Grandview beating the seventime state champion Green Wave — and won its first league championship in 26 years. So it is that it travels to Lucasville Valley tonight for its first playoff game in 18 years.
Greatness? Yep.
"What we said when we came in here was, ‘Why not?’ " Gordon said. "Why can’t we compete with the best? Why can’t we be the best? We’ve got everything here. We’ve got really nice facilities. We’ve got an outstanding community with great families. We have a great educational philosophy in the school. We have good athletes. We have everything in place, so why not us?"
No matter what happens from here on out, isn’t it nice they can finally stop asking that question?
Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch .
[email protected]
