LUCAS — From its season opener at Crestview to the state finals in Canton, the Lucas football team has had the support of loyal fans.
Lucas is a small town, but also a football town, and the enthusiasm has reached new heights in the face of perennial playoff runs. Still, none have matched this season.
Now the Cubs are preparing for their first state championship game in the school’s history, and no one is more thrilled than Pat Simon. He’s seen the team through thick and thin. He remembers the worst years in the program’s history and had a front-row seat to the team’s most glorious moments.
He’s witnessed the impassioned speeches of coaches at halftime. He’s familiar with the sober silence on the bus after brutal defeat. He’s experienced the electricity and laughter of the team when it blasts John Denver’s “Country Roads” after a big win.
For 40 seasons Simon has watched every game, meticulously recording every snap, catch, rush and pass made by the Cubs and their opponents. The longtime stats keeper may just be the most consistent thing about Cubs football, but even he didn’t anticipate just how far this year’s team would go.
“People came up to me this year (and asked), ‘Well what’s our chances?,” Simon said. “I said, ‘We got a good group of guys, but we lost some good guys, so I don’t know how far we’re going to go.’
“And here we are,” Simon continued with a beaming smile. “School history. One of the only teams in Richland County to make it this far.”
There’s a lot that goes into a successful team — hard work, talent, community support. But Simon believes the dynamic among the team members is what gave this group of Cubs the extra boost to make it all the way.
“Coach (Scott) Spitler has turned it into a family and the kids treat each other like they’re brothers,” said Simon. “After a good play, they’re hugging each other and high fiving each other … If you have a guy that’s down, the guy that’s next to him is going to try to cheer him up.
“There’s not individuals out there. None of them wants to come out and say, ‘Hey, I’m the star of this team.’”
Simon has seen how a sense of brotherhood can make or break a group.
“In 2000, we went to the playoffs,” recalled Simon. “I think that next year we won two games. And it’s just because that team in and of itself did not gel. They weren’t buddies. They weren’t family.”
It took the program years to recover. The Cubs wouldn’t see another playoff game until 2006. Lucas made it to the playoffs again in 2014 and have done so every year since.
The team’s unique offensive strategy makes a sense of family and unity even more crucial. According to middle school football coach Joe Marsano, the Cubs’ offensive scheme boils down to five plays, solidified through constant repetition in practice.
“It’s simple to run, hard to run correctly,” Marsano said. “You really have to do your job. If one person doesn’t do his job it can break down pretty quickly. So its a real team-oriented offense.”
The team may not be known for showy attacks, but they have their plays down to a science.
“It is an offense that in today’s world, fans definitely don’t like it … unless you’re into the pureness of football,” Simon commented. “There’s no passing. There’s not flashy … you don’t have a lot of 75-yard runs.”
According to Simon, the Cubs’ have always been characterized by rough, tough drives.
“In this town, we’ve never been a real passing team, no matter who the coach was,” Simon reflected. “Even back in the early 80s … their coach was a Woody Hayes-type of guy. It’s like three yards and a cloud of dust, and it’s kind of stayed that way.”
Perhaps the most noticeable change to the Cubs’ offense, he said, is that the players stick together more on the field than in the past.
“This group, we still run it, but you’re not out there yourself,” Simon continued. “You’re in a pile of your buddies and whether you want to get pushed or not, you’re gonna get pushed. So that has changed.”
Bill Zirzow, a Lucas resident and longtime Cubs football fan, noted that Spitler’s efforts to unify the approach of the pee wee, junior high and high school coaches have also been integral to the Cubs’ success over the past few years.
“At one point the pee wee teams were trying to run the same plays, but they were calling them different names,” stated Zirzow, who has two sons currently on the team. “Spit said, ‘Look we gotta all get together, we gotta be on the same page.’”
Now the teams learn the same plays and call them by the same numbers, regardless of age level.
“By the time they get to high school, what Coach Spitler’s doing is built on what I’ve already done,” Marsano said. “He doesn’t have to start day one with kids. It’s the same terminology, the same blocking, the same scheme, the same playcalling, the same drills… He’s just taking it to the next level.”
Although the program has evolved, one thing that never changed is the role coaches play in building character of the young men on their team.
“Program-wide I think that’s one of the keys to our success. We’re not driven by winning football games,” Marsano said. “The winning is not what’s important, it’s the kids that are important. You put your time and effort into the kids and in turn the kids will want to play harder for you and not want to disappoint you. And that works at the varsity level too. Those kids love Coach Spitler.”
On his own Lucas High School football team, Simon played safety and split end. He graduated in 1979. He was recruited to keep stats by his own coach, Bill Nardo, shortly afterward.
“(Nardo) says, ‘I need somebody to help me keep track of things.’ I said, ‘Sure Coach, I can do that,’” he recalled. “Another part of our mission was to haul all of the equipment to the game. The coach knew I had a pickup truck, so we threw all the helmets all the shoulder pads into the back of my pickup truck and off we’d go.”
Simon didn’t mind. He would do anything for Coach Nardo.
“After 40 years that’s the way I still I feel about my coach,” Simon said. “And I know Tommy and the guys playing are going to remember what Coach Spitler has said to them and did for them forever.”
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