Prep Powerhouse Puts Integrity To The True Test

You’ve taken your football team to 13 victories in 13 games. Your boys pounded the last opponent 49-7. Your kids have poured their hearts into every game and are finally just days away from the Super Bowl of Ohio high school football: the Division I state championship.

Everywhere you go, people congratulate you. All weekend long, it’s all you can think about.

You go to school on Monday flying high. Everyone is wild about the big game on Saturday.

A few hours later, you hear that a graduate was watching TV sports highlights on Saturday and told his mother, “Hey, I think I went to eighth grade with that kid. I wonder why he’s still in school.”

The mother, a school employee, asks a counselor the same question. He looks up the boy’s record: the defensive starter failed ninth grade and is in his fifth year of high school. That makes him ineligible to play sports. The information is passed on to you, the coach, the principal and the superintendent.

No one else in the whole world knows he’s ineligible except four people.

It doesn’t matter that the boy only played football for two years.

It doesn’t matter that the boy had family problems and barely showed up for ninth grade.

It doesn’t matter that his grades were terrible and that he finally pulled them up, got new friends and was trying to make something of his life.

A rule is a rule. And if you report the infraction to the state, your team will not get to play the big game. What do you do?

“It was not easy,” said Cincinnati Colerain High football coach Kerry Coombs. “I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was part of me that said, ‘Only four people know about this.’ But in the end, I could never have lived with that. That would have been a far worse lesson for our kids to learn, that we knew we did something wrong and didn’t tell. I’d never be able to look those kids in the eye again.”

The school reported itself to the state. Then Coombs called all his football players down to the auditorium. All except one. Another coach drove the ineligible player to the coach’s home and broke the news to him in private.

The team knew it was serious when Coombs asked them to pray. When he broke the news, they cried. Then he took them out onto the football field to end the season. They stood in their school clothes, surrounded by empty seats, and threw the football.

And Coombs did what any great coach would do, he turned it into a lesson.

“Nobody has died, nobody was hurt. Life is going to go on,” he told them. “You’ll encounter tragedy and disappointment of this kind again in life. The true measure of any man is how he picks himself up off the ground when he’s been knocked down.”

As the shock waves went through the community, the name of the ineligible player was blasted over TV and radio and in the newspaper. The boy, who had not yet made restitution on a prior theft charge because he has no money, found out a warrant was issued for his arrest. Coombs drove him to the police station so he could turn himself in.

The boy is just devastated, Coombs said. It’s one thing to see a football season end prematurely; it’s quite another to see a young boy’s life unravel.

“He’s had to come such a long way,” Coombs said. “I’m worried for him. Our coaches are really hovering over him right now. He’s getting put through the wringer. People lose sight that this is a kid. He may be 18, but he’s just a kid.”

The coaches were so busy giving the boy rides to school, helping him with his homework and checking his grades every week that no one ever asked about his eligibility.

“For the first time in his life, the kid felt worth something,” a school secretary said, crying. “I hope this doesn’t turn him the wrong way.”

Meanwhile, food, faxes and flowers have been flowing into the school from all over the state. Even officials from Brunswick High School, which faced Cleveland St. Ignatius in the state championship on Saturday, called to offer support.

Some people have called to donate money to help the ineligible student make restitution. The coach told them no. A coach to the end, he insisted: “Offer him a job instead.”