A million miles from McKinley-Massillon in the heart of a high school football drama

Week 10 roars in or limps in, as the case may be.

The colors of high school playoff football are out all over Ohio. For some, the shadows creep over one last Friday.

As the football flies from high school to high school, it is three miles from St. Thomas Aquinas (0-9 record) to Louisville (1-8). It is four miles from Louisville to East Canton (2-7). On the drive east on U.S. 30, the East Canton school district passes into that of Minerva (0-9).

Local authorities have not impounded the victory bell for disturbing the peace.

It's no joke to the people operating the programs.

Head coaches Kevin Henderson of St. Thomas Aquinas and John "Spider" Miller of East Canton are 60-something fighters who played for Canton high schools that no longer exist. Both worked in McKinley-Massillon games.

From another side of life, they strive to keep life in their messages.

Henderson once was a boxer learning from Olympic gold medalist Ronnie Harris and appearing on Meyers Lake Moonlight Ballroom cards featuring Boom Boom Mancini.

"I was smart enough to realize I had no future in the ring and fortunate to get out unscathed," he said.

He coached high school football at his alma mater, Timken, under Lonnie Ford and Lynn Wafler, and then at GlenOak under Fred Thomas. He worked college football at Walsh under Jim Dennison. He was head coach at Timken up until Canton pared the population of high schools to one, McKinley, in 2015.

Sandy Valley head coach Brian Gamble calls Henderson "one of the most interesting men in the world." They were friends at Walsh before Henderson spent five recent years on Gamble's staff at Sandy Valley.

Antonio Hall talked Henderson onto McKinley's staff in 2022.

"I know most of those guys at McKinley," Henderson said. "Antonio and I go back a long way. I went to school with his dad."

Another friend called almost too late to be serious in 2023. Aquinas didn't have a head coach and faced the possibility of disbanding football. Would Henderson mind taking an impossible job?

This was June, when Henderson was thinking about a McKinley season that wasn't far off.

"Antonio and I went over the pros and cons of the Aquinas job," Henderson said. "Some things he knew about were a little deeper than I thought.

"One thing led to another, and I said, 'Why not?'"

He remembered playing for coaches on Sonny Spielman's Timken staff who helped him through teen life. He thought of kids he himself coached for whom football was a lifesaver.

"The Aquinas kids kids needed an opportunity to play football," Henderson said. "They needed an opportunity to compete."

The Knights' 2021 and '22 seasons were marked by low roster numbers, cancellations and an 0-15 record. A 7-3 regular season and 35-0 playoff win over Toronto in 2019 seemed like ancient history at a school whose actual history includes a 1984 state championship.

The 2023 roster count at first was "not nearly enough." It built to 29 players.

The first four games brought losses of 30-0 at Campbell Memorial, 51-8 at Smithville, 42-6 to Mineral Ridge and 40-8 to Spider Miller's East Canton Hornets.

How was Henderson holding up?

"I'm good," he said coming off the East Canton game. "It's been tough, but we've gotten further than people thought we would. The kids are positive and upbeat. The coaching staff is positive and upbeat. The atmosphere around the school is amazing."

Aquinas' best Friday was Game 7 at Ravenna Southeast. The Knights led 8-6 before losing 21-8.

"We wore down, but it was exciting," Henderson said. "The kids began to trust each other."

Henderson has one of those striking James Earl Jones voices. His deep tone seems not to waver as he covers 2024 plans for Aquinas.

"We'll see how we can build this thing," he said. "We have a plan in place. We'll work to get numbers up. The kids we have … we're watching them grow up."

Playoff-bound Central Catholic invades Friday. Head coach Jeff Lindesmith has roughly twice as many players as Henderson.

"Sometimes with a smaller roster you're putting sophomores or even freshmen against almost full-grown men," said Lindesmith, another Timken graduate. "That can take away their thirst from playing.

"In my younger years, Coach (Lowell) Klinefelter would say, 'For every sophomore you play, that'll be a loss, because physically he's not ready."

Spider Miller played for Lincoln's last football team before the Lions got swallowed by a Canton City Schools consolidation.

Miller coached on state championship teams at McKinley. He has been a head coach at McKinley, Perry and, for the last eight seasons, East Canton. His 2017 and '18 teams each won a playoff game.

This year has been a slog, pulling his overall record to 40-40.

The two wins were over Aquinas and Tuscarawas Central Catholic, both 0-9.

Before a game against Strasburg, Miller said, "We don't have as many kids this year, and we've had quite a few injuries. It's going to be nice to look across the field and see a team with the same numbers we have."

East Canton led Strasburg until the final moments. Strasburg scored and won 12-7.

Coaches feel for colleagues in the same boat.

"He's a heck of a coach," Miller said of Strasburg's Jimm Morris. "You can see the structure, the discipline. It's on film. We're trying to do all the right things."

A week after beating East Canton, Strasburg fell 40-6 to Buckeye Trail. A week after that, East Canton lost 45-14 to Buckeye Trail.

"You've just got to keep working hard," Miller said. "I think we all work very hard. As a coaching staff, you try to find some more energy and work harder, try to find a weakness in your opponent, find a play.

"We're trying to get them in the right position to be successful, and that's what every team is trying to do."

East Canton's 2023 finale is the "battle of the Hornets," with 8-1 Malvern coming in.

It will be Malvern's third game in five outings against a team with a roster in the low 20s.

Malvern (8-1) will dress about twice as many players as East Canton.

"If you can't get kids out to play, it's really hard to win," Malvern head coach Matt Chiurco said. "We've been fortunate here that our numbers are pretty good all the way through.

"It's helped that we've gone from tackle youth football to flag. Kids sometimes get burnt out. At smaller schools, you need every kid you can get.

"We've run flag three years. Our high school kids coach our flag kids. It's an eight-week thing, and the kids are disappointed that it's over, which is what we want. We want them to want to play."

Eric Henry regularly faces Stark County teams as head coach at Claymont. In Tuscarawas County, he sees two or three teams with rosters the size of East Canton's and Aquinas'.

"I don't know how those guys do it," Henry said. "Kudos to them for sticking to it. I know how difficult it is with 45 or 50 kids."

Kevin Henderson views this as something he must do. He puts a humorous spin on a saying from politics and tells people the aim is to "make Aquinas great again."

Louisville and Minerva made great traditions before falling on hard-to-explain times.

The Leopards reached the Division II state finals in 2007 and put up 10-0 regular seasons in 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2013, a sequence leading to their league voting them off the island.

A descent as an independent has included records of 2-7 in 2020, 2-8 in 2021, 3-7 in 2022 and 1-8 this year.

At Minerva, a resurgence under coach Brett Yeagley peaked in 2011 when the Lions went 10-0 and beat Poland in the playoffs.

The bottom fell out with an 0-10 year in 2015. Since then the Lions have gone 0-10, 0-10, 0-10, 1-9, 2-8, 0-10, 0-9, and, heading into the 2023 season finale against Carrollton, 0-9.

Through 2010, Louisville vs. Minerva was a season-ending rivalry. The teams battled in the middle seasons from 2011-17.

Minerva's last hurrah in the series was a 29-26 win that put the Lions at 5-0 in 2011.

The 2023 Louisville Leopards are in their first year under head coach Chris Kappas. They were outscored 216-30 in five straight weeks of losses to Federal League teams. They close at home against a Steubenville dynamo on an 8-0 hot streak.

Minerva went 0-9 and was outscored 434-62 last year under a new head coach, Tim Speakman. That was a slight improvement over getting outscored 540-51 while going 0-10 in 2021.

Speakman's second team is 0-9 heading into a season finale against Carrollton, a rival the Lions haven't defeated in 10 years.

As the regular season ends, these are playoff times for some teams and different times for others.

Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com

On Twitter: @sdoerschukREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: With no hope of OHSAA playoffs, high school football coaches fight on