My first face-to-face encounter with Erik Will couldn’t have been more uncomfortable.

It was Week 3 of the 2014 football season and Will’s Shelby Whippets had just squandered a lead in the final 30 seconds of what became a 20-19 loss at Clear Fork.

The game-winning touchdown came on an improvised 46-yard-pass made possible only after a receiver snuck behind an inexperienced Shelby secondary instructed to keep everything in front of it.

A former defensive back at Shelby, Will was understandably frustrated with what had just transpired. The last thing he wanted to do was rehash the final half-minute.

But, as I would soon discover, Will was never one to duck his media responsibilities, no matter how disagreeable.

“There are certain plays you have to make to seal a game and we are still figuring out how to do that,” he said at the time. “We’re just trying to figure out how to win games like this. We’re really close.”

It took two seasons, but the Whippets would learn to win under Will. The 1999 Shelby graduate piloted his alma mater to a regional runner-up finish in 2016 and an appearance in the state semifinals in 2017.

Will is one of three area coaches to turn in his resignation since time ran out on the 2018 season, joining Crestview’s Dan Mager and, most recently, Lexington’s Taylor Gerhardt.

The north central Ohio coaching fraternity — along with the local media — will sorely miss them all.

Hired in 2013 to replace Steve McCoy, who was 2-18 in his two seasons at Shelby, Will got off to an inauspicious start. Shelby was 3-17 in his first two seasons, but turned the corner in 2015.

The Whippets finished 5-5, setting the stage for arguably the two most memorable seasons in program history. Led by Division I recruit Brennan Armstrong, Shelby rumbled all the way to the regional championship game before falling to Steubenville in 2016.

The following year, the Whippets reached the state semifinals before again running into Steubenville.  The Big Red beat Shelby, 35-22, en route to the Division IV state title.

With almost an entirely new cast of characters, the Whippets started 2018 with three straight wins before injuries and a rugged schedule conspired against them. Shelby finished 5-5 with three losses coming to playoff qualifiers.

Will capped his six-year run with a record of 37-30. Shelby was 34-13 in his final five seasons.

“Every coach has a pulse on their program and I feel the kids may need to hear a new voice,” Will said when he announced his decision.

Like Will, Gerhardt inherited an adverse situation when he took over at Lexington in 2014. The Minutemen were 6-14 in two seasons under Dan Studer, but were coming off a 1-9 season in 2013.

“I want to bring the passion back,” Gerhardt, a 1989 Malabar graduate, said at the time. “We’re going to bring the pride back to Lexington football.”

Indeed.

The Minutemen were 0-10 in Gerhardt’s first season, but won their first five games in 2015 thanks in no small part to a wildly talented freshman defensive back named Cade Stover.

This year’s Mr. Football award winner would help Lex reach the regional championship game in 2016, but graduation took its toll and the Minutemen staggered to a 2-8 record the following fall.

It looked like Lex would stumble to another sub-.500 finish this year, starting the season 0-3 and sitting at 1-4 at the midway point. The Minutemen won their final five regular season games then upset No. 2 seed Tiffin Columbian in the opening round of the Division III playoffs.

“Our kids … believe in the brotherhood. They never quit on each other,” Gerhardt said after a Week 10 win over Canton South. “We didn’t change a whole lot. They just stuck together. I can’t tell you how proud I am of them.”

The situation at Crestview was only slightly less dire when Mager took over in 2015. The Cougars were 2-8 the previous year and had been trending in the wrong direction since reaching the second round of the playoffs under Chad Coffman in 2011.

Crestview won three games in Mager’s first season but went 7-3 in 2016 and 2017, just missing out on a playoff berth in 2017. The Cougars were 5-5 this season with four losses to playoff qualifiers. Crestview knocked off playoff participant Loudonville in Week 1 and won its final three games.

Mager finished with a 22-18 record in his four seasons, but the wins offer only a snapshot of a much broader picture.

Just months before the start of the 2016 season, the Crestview community was rocked by the loss of Walker Ramsey, who died unexpectedly after suffering a seizure in the middle of the night.

Tragedy struck again just weeks before the 2018 season kicked off when senior Gavin Lowe was involved in an automobile accident. Lowe suffered serious injuries in the one-vehicle crash.

Crestview closed the home portion of its 2018 schedule with a win over Firelands Conference rival South Central. The significance of the victory was not lost on Mager.

“The thing that makes me the happiest,” Mager said as fireworks exploded through a steady rain at Scott Bailey Memorial Field, “is these seniors get to leave this field for the last time with a win.

“That is a big deal to me.”

I had the good fortune to interview Will, Gerhardt and Mager shortly after they were hired and each of them told me, in his own way, he hoped to leave the program in better shape than he found it.

It’s not exactly ground-breaking stuff — coaches have been offering up variations on the same theme for as long as sports reporters have been asking them about their long-term goals — but all three men can rest easy knowing they accomplished their mission.