The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Stillman Cup fosters Lorain County rivalry
Firelands, Vermilion connected through ADs Ty and Andy Stillman
What is the Stillman Cup? That’s a question Firelands and Vermilion athletic directors Ty and Andy Stillman have received several times over the years.
“People know Stillman. They know the Stillman name. They kind of get that,” Firelands’ Ty Stillman explained. “I have many a freshman, many a middle school kid who know what the Stillman Cup is, but then are asking the question, ‘What is the Stillman Cup? I don’t get what that is.’ So they don’t know my brother is the athletic director at Vermilion.”
Ty turns to Andy, his Vermilion counterpart, asking the same question many students have asked him, with one instance in recent memory sticking out.
“Well I make sure, like at bowling for example, I went and said, ‘Hey, you guys understand it’s the Stillman Cup. Do you know what that is?’” Andy recalled, saying the response he received back was, “‘Oh yeah, isn’t that where you play against your twin?”
Ty’s office at Firelands lit up with laughter on a late January afternoon as Andy manages to keep a straight face while grinning from ear to ear and continuing on.
“Well, we’re not twins, and I kind of have to explain the scenario, especially with someone like a younger kid on the different teams.”
Once it clicks for the kids from both districts, it’s much to the surprise, amazement and wonder of the students, especially given the astronomical odds to have two brothers end up as athletic directors at nearby area schools.
“They think, ‘Wow! How does your brother become an athletic director? How did you?” Ty chimes in. “They walk away with their minds blown.”
That still begs the question: What is the Stillman Cup? How did two community schools in the Lorain County area begin a friendly rivalry that gets both sides revved up to play each other?
KThere’s a little history that needs to be told first.
Both brothers grew up and attended Olmsted Falls before eventually winding up as athletic directors at Lorain County schools.
Andy, the older brother by 22 months, competed in football, wrestling and track and field. He’s been running the ship at Vermilion for the last eight years. For Ty, he played football and participated in track and field for the Bulldogs. He originally had a three-year stop at Oberlin before jumping over to Firelands and has been the Falcons’ athletic director for the past seven years.
Ty’s wife is a middle school counselor in the Vermilion school district, further deepening the ties.
Andy said he and his younger brother were always competitive as kids “from the jump.”
“As far as I can remember, we would always be outside, competing and playing in the yard,” Andy elaborated. “For a long time, it was just us. So we had to play two-man baseball with ghost men on any base and any game we could think of, right?”
Ty took his moment to chime in, sharing his perspective of the state of affairs.
“As the younger brother, I always want to try and keep up with the older brother,” he acknowledged. “Even though he’s just 22 months older, I always wanted to try and keep up. The competitiveness is just me trying to be like my older brother, but it was never of a fire like — and it still isn’t to this day — of ‘I’ve got to beat that guy! Now I’ve got to beat him. It’s more of a … a family, competitive banter more than anything getting ugly.”
That healthy rivalry they shared as kids carried on into adulthood, bringing us to the origins of how the Stillman Cup came to be.
“I became an athletic director a couple of years before Andy,” Ty said. “I was at Oberlin when he first became the AD at Vermilion. When he got that job, we — as athletic directors — one of the things we do is schedule (games and events). So we kind of said, ‘Hey! We should play each other in some things,’ and we said ‘OK, let’s see what we can get on the schedule.’”
While Ty said they initially talked about putting football on their upcoming schedules, Andy’s Vermilion Sailors played Oberlin on the gridiron, though Ty had already moved on to his current role at Firelands.
“The schedule kind of got us together in playing against each other,” he said. “I don’t remember how exactly we decided to do the Stillman Cup …”
Ty turned his head to the right toward Andy, looking for help when he’d momentarily gotten stuck.
“Even when you were at Oberlin, we always talked about that we should try to play each other and everything, and maybe we could have some sort of award or trophy,” Andy recalled, with Ty verbalizing his agreement while nodding.
“When (Ty) came to Firelands, it was kind of already a rivalry, both in location and the communities,” Andy said. “Firelands and Vermilion were a rivalry I think anyway. This just made it easier. We came up with the cup, decided how it would go and I think it started that 2015-2016 year.”
The two both were trying to remember how everything eventually crystallized into the current Stillman Cup that was made for the winner of each year’s contest, with Ty saying they started it that 2015-2016 academic year but didn’t bring the actual hardware into the picture until the next year, with the two brothers keeping track of the tallies.
“When I was at Oberlin and we were going to play Vermilion, because the schools were different sizes, different places in where they were athletically, it was hard to play in all of the sports,” Ty noted. “It just didn’t mesh.”
Andy agreed, stating it wasn’t competitive athletically at the time between those two schools before Firelands came into the picture.
“It was similar-sized school districts,” Andy said.
“And the games were already built into our schedules,” Ty cut in.
“We played them a lot anyway,” Andy nodded as he leaned back just a bit.
“Not everything,” Ty added. “But football, basketball, basketball.”
“Most of the sports,” Andy finished as the two brothers went back and forth, playing off one another for a while, with Ty noting they wrestle a dual match every year now and they used to run cross country against one another (Firelands won this year’s wrestling dual in a thrilling 41-30 matchup a few weeks after this conversation took place).
Baseball, softball and track and field always happen, with points for track and field being kept differently for purposes of the cup.
“But really, we just started it for ourselves,” Ty said as the period bell went off in the hallway.
“It was something fun that we thought, ‘Hey, this would be a fun thing to do.’ And it turned into a really positive thing for both communities,” Andy said. “I think the communities look forward to it. The kids certainly do. It’s just one more thing to celebrate in these communities, and that’s really the byproduct of why we did it.”
“I didn’t think much of it until — we just had this trophy and it stayed in your office or something,” Ty segwayed back in.
“And then we started bringing it to the games when you came here for a girls basketball game in 2017-2018. Then they beat us and took pictures with the cup, and the kids were so excited in Vermilion that they beat us. I was like ‘Wow! OK, I thought this was just between Andy and I, but we can do that.’”
That moment was when they decided that if Ty’s Falcons could beat Andy’s Sailors the next time they played, he could then take the cup home with him. What once was a competition between brothers spread through the Firelands and Vermilion communities to foster a healthy, competitive rivalry in interscholastic athletics. The unique circumstances that brought two brothers to nearby Lorain County schools set the foundation for an event that is circled on every athlete’s calendar.
Ty recalled the Firelands girls basketball team saw Andy’s team celebrating and how they wanted to do that as well.
“For the first couple of years, we barely got to hold the Stillman Cup and bring it home,” Ty said as he turned the Stillman Cup sitting on his desk roughly 90 degrees, with the engraved plating on the wooden base.
Vermilion dominated the first few years of the Stillman Cup before Firelands brought it home the last two years. In the first year of Vermilion’s fouryear run, Firelands only won in one of the sports in which the schools played each other.
“It’s one of those things where it took a life of its own, when it was just between brothers, and now the communities are into it,” Andy said. “When we were playing each other in the regional finals for baseball, no one cared that the winner was going to the state tournament or whatever. It was more about ‘Who gets the Stillman Cup?’ Like, that’s what all the signs were about and we’d already done the Stillman cup. This was something completely different.”
The two brothers laughed for a moment, as people cared less about a state final four berth than what the two brothers managed to foster between their communities, athletes, and for themselves.
They’re able to make jokes back and forth for a moment about what came out of a friendly competition between two athletic directors — who just so happen to be brothers. It came as a surprise to the two, “never to be mean or derogatory,” as Ty put it.
“It’s what people get excited about. It’s crazy, it’s weird,” Andy added.
Over these last few years, the cup has become a staple. For the kids who look back from the earliest classes who were Stillman Cup athletes, it’ll be about taking away great experiences, something the two brothers agreed on wholeheartedly.
“To me as an athletic director, that’s what our job is about,” Ty said. “It’s not about just scheduling the games and getting the uniforms and hiring a coach, all of that can go into the experience. When you leave after four years, the experience they have, to be something positive and that they talk about five, 10, 20 years down the road with their classmates, that’s what my goal is.
“Whether it’s wins or losses, it’s everything wrapped up into the experience that the kids have and I think the Stillman cups just adds to that experience.”