The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Kirtland, Chardon share paths to greatness
More than a decade ago, young Anthony DeMarco got into his defensive stance and peered across the line of scrimmage.
A player on Kirtland’s youth football team who was a member of the Great Lakes Youth Football League, DeMarco didn’t really know anybody on the team they faced that day.
He only knew that team was from Chardon.
Today, the kids who met on the gridiron that day know a lot more about each other both as people and as student-athletes.
Many are friends with one another.
Most are ferocious competitors.
ALL are state champions.
Say this much about the Great Lakes Youth Football League. It knows how to raise state championship football players.
Just ask the Chardon Hilltoppers and the Kirtland Hornets, many — if not most — of their players who came up through the youth ranks playing against each other in the same league.
“That’s kinda cool,” said DeMarco, a running back/
safety on Kirtland’s threetime state championship team. “We played them in football and played them in basketball in the youth leagues. It’s pretty cool that both of us went on to win state championships
this season.”
The parallels between the 2020 Kirtland and Chardon football teams go well beyond their roots in the Great Lakes Youth Football League.
The Hornets and the
Hilltoppers have a lot more in common than their start in youth football and their ending as the Division III (Chardon) and Division V (Kirtland) state championship football teams.
Consider the following:
Culture
No one has to tell the kids of Chardon and Kirtland what the football culture is in their town.
For Kirtland, we’re talking about a football program that has won six state championships and has three state runnerup finishes in the past 10 years. It’s a program that has gone an unfathomable 185-17 (.916) in 15 years under Coach Tiger LaVerde.
Breaking that down a little more, Kirtland could lose 167 games in a row and LaVerde would still be one game over .500 as a Hornet.
Not like that would ever happen.
Then over at Chardon, you have a program that is as tough-as-nails as it gets. While the Hilltoppers don’t have quite the playoff rate that Kirtland has — who does? — Chardon is well-known for its brand of football that thrives on excellence and doing things the right way under passionate head coach Mitch Hewitt and his staff.
Just like Kirtland does with LaVerde and his staff.
Former Browns coach Sam Rutigliano once said, “Character is doing the right thing when no one else is watching.”
Everybody sees what Kirtland and Chardon do on Friday nights.
What they don’t see are the countless hours in the weight room in the offseason. The personal workouts in the home gyms.
Guys like Chardon’s Nick Fay shoveling mulch and doing landscaping with his father in the summers — good for muscle and cardio — or Kirtland’s Mason Sullivan harnessing up and pulling his dad’s F150 down the street for a leg workout. That’s culture. Those are unspoken rules in Kirtland and Chardon.
Stuff no one sees, except for the results on Friday night.
Style of play
Kirtland and Chardon embrace the physicality of the game.
In a day and age in which spread offenses have teams whipping the ball all over the field for 48 minutes, the Hornets and Hilltoppers would rather close down line splits and beat teams over the head with a sledge-hammer for an hour or so.
Relatively speaking, of course.
Kirtland’s base offense — the Stack-I — is legendary around the area and around the state.
Chardon’s base offense — the Wing-T — celebrated its 40th anniversary in the program this year.
Yeah, the Hilltoppers and Hornets can do other things than run their base offense. There are more frills than that. But that’s what they hang their hats on
hey run the ball. And when they DO play-action pass, 11 defenders, two coordinators and the majority of the fans bite on it, thus making for some highlight reel pass plays.
Defensively, the teams thrive on punishing hits, swarming to the ball and taking offense to any team gaining a yard, let alone scoring a touchdowns.
They are so good at what they do scheme-wise, the opposition might very well know what’s coming — and they STILL can’t stop it.
Few things are more impressive on the gridiron than that.
Good kids
Nothing is worse than getting the ball rammed down your throat by the opposing team’s offense, or getting de-cleated when you’ve got the ball in your hands.
Getting helped up by the opposing team — yeah, that’s worse.
But that’s the type of kids Chardon and Kirtland have.
Chardon’s Vince Ferrante, Christian Hall, Myles Mendeszoon and Kirtland’s Mason Rus, Carson Andonian and Luke Gogolin are some of the most ferocious hitters in the area.
They’ve also been known to help the ballcarrier off the ground now and then after knocking them silly with a bone-jarring tackle.
That’s class.
On a more personal level, it never ceased to amaze me this season when Kirtland’s Joey Grazia — a fellow golfer like myself — asked me during pregame warm-ups what I shot that day, knowing that I play golf on Friday mornings, or Chardon’s James Pettyjohn — a hunter like myself — asking me if I got any big bucks on camera recently.
Good kids.
Easy to root for.
All of them.
Add it all up and you have two similar football programs.
Chardon and Kirtland have culture-plus programs. They work hard, even when no one is watching, and they have extraordinary leadership.
The Hornets and Hilltoppers embrace the same blue-collar type of play
that hangs its hat on running the ball effectively and playing spectacular defense.
The achieve their goals with hard-working, highcharacter, emotionallypeaked young men.
That they came up through the youth ranks in the same youth football league is just a testament to two towns that share a border having like-minded football families.
The state championships Kirtland and Chardon won were separated by a few hours. Kirtland won its championship the morning of Nov. 21, while Chardon won its title later that evening.
That the Hilltoppers and Hornets achieved the highest level of excellent on the same day is apropos, considering how much they have in common.