‘Like magic’: Linden-mckinley has unprecedented turnaround
When Eric Valentine took over as the football coach at Linden-mckinley in 2018, he knew he was facing a challenge.
In the previous four seasons, the Panthers had won a combined seven games. The roster was small, and the football program was in disarray. It was so tumultuous that Valentine was the team’s third head coach for the 2018 season alone, and he started just one week before the first game.
“There was a lot of turmoil,” Valentine said. “The seniors at that point, they were bought in to a point, but they were confused on what direction they were headed and where to go. That really created some problems.”
Valentine’s goal was to build Linden up from the foundation, laying one layer of bricks at a time. That meant putting extra effort into forming relationships with the freshmen in his first
season — not ignoring the upperclassmen, but paying special attention to the players who were the future of the program.
Travis Foster and Terrell Jones were two of the freshmen who embraced Valentine’s message right away. Three-plus years later, after the best season in Linden history in 2021, Valentine points to Foster and Jones as the key leaders behind the turnaround.
The path hasn’t been smooth. In 2018, Linden didn’t win a game, and it received its only win in 2019 by forfeit. Valentine recalls a handful of snaps the Panthers played with fewer than 11 players on the field in the 2019 season after injuries to the already tiny roster.
But in 2021, Linden won eight games for the first time in school history and qualified for the playoffs on merit for the first time. (During the COVID-19 season of 2020, all teams made the postseason.) For his efforts, Valentine was named the Division IV Central District Coach of the Year.
After the dark early days, this year’s success is almost unbelievable to Foster.
“At times it was just me and three other players and the coaches at practice with full equipment on,” Foster recalled. “Nobody out there taking it seriously, nobody acting like they care about it. Now it’s like all the pieces that fell apart, the pieces came together, and it just worked like magic. That’s all I wanted.”
The first layer of the foundation Valentine focused on was faith, with involvement from New Albany Presbyterian Church, which helps lead Linden’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes group, and Linden pastor L.B. Towns, who has four sons on the team — including junior starting quarterback Chris Towns, who already holds nearly all of Linden’s passing records.
Knowing the challenges many of his players face in their daily lives away from the football field, Valentine felt it was crucial to establish the values of his program and create a support system.
“Foundation of our values, what we believe in, what we’re gonna stand for was what we really started with,” Valentine said. “We’re really strong with our FCA program and our faith. That has been something that we do weekly throughout the year, not just during the season. … That has really paid dividends in getting our moral compass and our solid foundation of who we are and what we stand for.”
The next layer of the foundation was building support throughout the Linden community, which Valentine says has had a major breakthrough this season. That process started with the team picking up trash around Linden and planting vegetables for the local kids, anything Valentine could do to have his team recognized in a positive light.
“It just took more of us showing that we were actually committed to what we were selling,” Valentine said. “One of the biggest pieces for us was giving back to the community and being more publicly recognizable in the community. We’re sitting here as a community school, a City school, and wanting our community’s support, but what were we giving back to the community?
“It wasn’t really until we got out into the community with our uniforms on, started picking up trash, having that engagement directly with the community that the community started to recognize, ‘Hey, this team is for real. Let’s get behind them.’ ”
Seeing the stands fill with more fans than Linden has had in years was special for Foster and Jones, even as they were both limited by injuries in their senior seasons.
“We brought the whole Linden community in,” Jones said. “They’re now aware of what we can do. It’s an amazing thing. As long as we have our community behind us, I feel like we can do anything we want.”
Both players, as well as the coach they trusted to lead them on this path, have a sense of how incredible Linden’s turnaround has been. They know the 2021 team will leave a lasting legacy.
It will always be the team that won more games than any other Linden team before, and the team that got the community to take notice.
“We’ve come so far,” Foster said. “We always get downplayed. Everybody was always talking about us. To be on top and just to feel good about ourselves, I feel like we are going to leave a legacy.
“Nobody else has done this before when I’ve known Linden. We beat teams that we haven’t beaten in over a decade, two decades. That’s an accomplishment. We changed history. This is a legacy. We’re legends.”
bjohnson@dispatch.com