Jake's Take: Crestview chasing Firelands Conference, Richland County history with streak

MANSFIELD — Each time the Crestview Cougars step on the court, they are thinking W.

But when it comes to Firelands Conference games, they are thinking of absolute domination. They did that over the weekend with convincing wins over St. Paul on Thursday and Western Reserve on Saturday pushing their Firelands Conference winning streak to 23 games. And while winning is always on their minds, the Cougars are now 12-0 and 7-0 in FC play, it means a little bit more when it comes to facing league opponents.

FIRELANDS CONFERENCE DOMINANCE: It's a choice: Crestview routs St. Paul, take sole control of Firelands Conference race

“Our kids want to win the conference,” Crestview coach John Kurtz said. “There was such a long dry spell over here and now, we have been successful in the conference. A major part of it is when you haven’t done it for so long, you don’t want to go back to that way.”

Last season, the Cougars completed just the 18th undefeated league run in Firelands Conference history and picked up their first league championship since the 1999-2000 season when they went back-to-back. Now, the only thing that is left is to do it again.

“We are confident in ourselves,” Crestview senior Sam Wells said. “We aren’t going to let someone else come in and tell us who we are. So we are going to play as hard as we can each time out.”

It is as simple as that. The Cougars are winning Firelands Conference games by an average of 33.3 points and all but two have come via a running clock as they win by more than 35. On Thursday night, the Cougars led 22-4 after the first quarter and even had a 20-2 lead at one point. It would have been easy to put it in cruise control and slug to a sloppy win but they remained crisp all night thanks to a simple approach.

“Every day, we tell that that every game is a new game,” Kurtz said. “That is so cliché coming from a coach, but it is a fact that we cannot look at corresponding scores anymore. They just don’t make sense. So we tell our kids to go play this game and we will worry about the next one later. So, far, it has been good. One thing I will say about this group is the culture is very tight. The kids are tight and there are nights where an open guy doesn’t get the ball, but it never becomes a problem.”

The Cougars seem well on their way to another unblemished FC title after completing the first round through unchallenged. Last season, the Cougars joined teams from Mapleton (1966-67), Western Reserve (1968-69, 2003-04, 2007-08, 2018-19, 2020-21 and 2021-22), Hillsdale (1969-70), South Central (1972-73), Monroeville (1975-76 and 1983-84), St. Paul (1984-85), New London (1990-91 and 1991-92) and Plymouth (2008-09, 2009-10 and 2014-15) as the only teams to win undefeated Firelands Conference championships in the league's 63-year history.

Currently, the Cougars are sitting on 23-straight Firelands Conference wins which is the longest such streak in school history topping the 18-straight league wins they piled up from 1964-67 when they were undefeated Johnny Appleseed Conference champs in 1965-66.

It is the fourth-longest streak in Firelands Conference history as the Cougars have some history to chase down. The Plymouth Big Red won 29 straight games from 2008-2011 during a campaign where they won back-to-back undefeated titles from 2008-10. New London won 34 straight from 1989-92 featuring a run of back-to-back undefeated championships from 1990-92. But Western Reserve holds the record for the conference's longest league winning streak at 38 games when the Roughriders went unblemished in back-to-back years in 2020-22 and also finished the 2019-20 season with nine straight league wins before rattling off 28 straight in the next two seasons and seeing the streak end with one win in 2022 before seeing that streak end last season in a 59-45 loss to Crestview.

So, the Cougars are on the right track and seem to be on their way to challenging that record needing to finish out this season perfectly. If the Cougars can make it through, they will head into next season with a 30-game FC winning streak and with Top 2 scorers Justice Thompson and Tyson Ringler returning along with emerging sophomores Karter Goon and Daniel Wells and a decent junior varsity team, that 38-game record is in some serious trouble.

And while the Cougars focus on the FC record, just how close are they to the Richland County record for the longest conference winning streak? Let's take a look.

Longest conference winning streaks in Richland County boys basketball history

I'll start this off by saying that conferences were pretty unstable back in the day so most of these come during the hay day when leagues decided to go to a two-round system where everyone plays each other twice in a season as opposed to just having six or seven conference games a year like they did back in the 40s and 50s and even into the 70s.

We know Crestview's history. So let's start at Clear Fork. The Colts's record for longest league winning streak is 16 which started in 1977-78 and ended early in 1980. The Colts have just one undefeated league championship in 1978-79 when they won the famous Johnny Appleseed Conference despite being the only one of three Richland County schools with a state championship in 2001-02. The Colts actually lost two league games that year, their only two losses of the season.

The Lucas Cubs school record is 21 games when they went undefeated in the Mid-Buckeye Conference from 2018-20 and even went 9-1 in the league the next two years before going 10-0 again last year making it a solid 48-2 conference record over the last five seasons. Currently, they are on an 18-game MBC winning streak so they could set a new program mark by season's end.

It is crazy to think a program like Lexington, which has two state championships, has a program record of just 23 straight league wins, but that speaks to the level of competition the Minutemen played against in their league over the years. Lexington won those 23 straight league games starting in 1962-66. They went undefeated in the Johnny Appleseed Conference from 1963-65 winning back-to-back undisputed league championships with perfect 9-0 records. Strangely enough, the Minutemen played each conference opponent twice, but league rules back then only allowed one of those meetings to count toward the league record and the other was considered nonconference. In today's age, that streak would have been much larger. I told you leagues were weird back in the day.

During their first state title run in 1988-89, Lex did go 10-0 in the Ohio Heartland Conference but lost the last league game of the season the year before and the first league game the following season so a streak never really developed. During the 1990-91 title run. Lex went 7-1 in the OHC.

The Madison Rams had a program record 24 straight league wins back in 1978-81 going undefeated in the Cardinal Conference in 1979-80 behind Joe Jakubick's 24 points per game. It remains the only undefeated league championship since at least 1944.

The Shelby Whippets have two 25-game conference winning streaks as their program's record. From 1953-58, the Whippets rallied off 25 straight in the Northern Ohio League behind Larry Siegfried and had he been allowed to play varsity as a freshman, that streak would probably be much higher. He led the Whippets to three straight undefeated NOL championships going 7-0 and year. Again, like Lexington, Shelby played each conference opponent twice, but only one meeting counted toward the league record.

Then, from 2018-21, the Whippets rattled off 25 straight Mid-Ohio Athletic Conference games with an undefeated league championship in 2019-20 as part of that run.

We touched on Plymouth's program record of 29 straight FC wins. They went 14-0 in back-to-back years led by Richland County boys basketball's only 2,000-point scorer, Brook Turson. The Big Red lost their second-to-last FC game in 2007-08 and their first league game after Turson graduated for the third-best FC winning streak in league history.

Ontario has had several undefeated league championships the first of which came in 1989-90 as part of a 17-game Mid-Ohio Conference championship, but that doesn't even come close to the school record. From 1995-99, the Warriors won 30 straight North Central Conference titles running through the league undefeated from 1996-98 during a legendary run under Joe Balogh. Years later from 2005-08, the Warriors made a run at the program record but finished with 24 straight after winning the NCC in 2006-07 with an undefeated league record. Ontario has six undefeated league championships in program history.

The most recent display of conference dominance came from St. Peter's as the Spartans rattled off 36 straight Mid-Buckeye Conference games from 2015-19 with undefeated league championships from 2016-18. The Spartans didn't belong to a league during their state championship runs in 1968 and 1978 and actually didn't have a conference affiliate until the 2013-14 season when they joined the MBC. During Joe Jakubick's six-year tenure as head coach, he led the Spartans to a 54-8 record and if you take away his final year as coach when the Spartans went 5-5, he went 49-3 in five seasons. The Spartans won 113 games during those six seasons averaging nearly 19 wins a season. Talk about a special run.

But there is nothing more special than what the Mansfield Senior Tygers did during the late 90s and early 2000s. From 1997-2003, the Tygers rattled off a Richland County record 49 consecutive conference games with an amazing four straight undefeated Ohio Heartland Conference championships under legendary coach Gregg Collins. The Tygers went 7-1 in the OHC during the 1997-98 season winning their final three conference games after a loss to Madison prevented a perfect season. The Tygers then went 8-0, 12-0, 12-0, 12-0 and 10-2 seeing their streak end in a 64-53 loss to Ashland on Dec. 20, 2002.

During the 2003-04 season, another conference winning streak started as the Tygers won their last four Ohio Cardinal Conference games that season and proceeded to go 14-0 and 14-0 over the next two seasons in the OCC before starting the 2006-07 campaign with two OCC wins to give them 34 straight league wins, still 15 short of the program record but one of the best runs in Richland County history.

Under Collins from 1996-2008, the Tygers piled up a league record of an amazing 129-11 before Effie James took over for the next four seasons and went 47-9 in the OCC. In JT Reese's first four seasons, the Tygers went 46-10. So, From 1996-2016 The Tygers went 222-30 in conference play with eight undefeated league championships and 17 ten-plus win league seasons.

So there are the streaks the Cougars are chasing.

jfurr@gannett.com

740-244-9934

@JakeFurr11

This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Crestview Cougars have won 23 straight Firelands Conference boys basketball games