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Indiana crowned five state football champions this weekend in the annual two-day gridiron marathon at Indianapolis.
The history of our state’s football tournament dates back to 1973, when Clayton Myers coached his Greenfield Central team to the first 2A state title.
Greenfield Central honored Myers this fall by naming its football field in his honor.
That gave Myers one more thing in common with his own high school coach, the late Cecil E. “Zeke” Young.
Both men have been inducted into the Indiana Football Hall of Fame. Young already had a field that bears his name at DeKalb High School.
“Coach Young was the kind of guy that made you want to play for him,” Myers said.
Myers laced up his cleats for Young at Auburn High School in the late 1940s — on teams that won 24 games in a row. In Myers’ junior season of 1947, Auburn allowed only one touchdown all year, and not until its final game.
Myers played guard for the Auburn Red Devils in a throwback style of offense. The “T” formation had become popular by the late ’40s, but “Zeke” clung stubbornly to his success formula.
“He was probably the only one running that unbalanced line with the single wing,” Myers said of Young. “Every running play, I had to pull out and lead it.”
Everything old is new again, because Myers sees a lot of similarity between the single wing and football’s newest fad, the “wildcat” offense with its direct snaps to running backs.
But some things never go out of style in winning football.
“He worked us really hard, and he made us believe that we could get the job done,” Myers said about Young. “He was the type of guy that demanded a lot of respect. If a coach gets the respect of the players, it makes them play really hard for him.
“I remember some of the drills that he used, and even though it was way back, I still was able to do some of that” a quarter-century later at Greenfield Central, Myers said.
Young emphasized “learning to block and tackle properly and to get in a proper stance,” Myers explained. “If some guy would beat us, he would take us aside and show us maybe it was just a little step in the wrong direction.”
Young coached track and field with as much success as football. One of his runners, Don Lash, made it to the 1936 Olympics.
Myers followed Young’s pattern and became a double-sport coach, too.
“Being a track coach, I demanded that the kids be in real good physical shape,” Myers recalled. “I had the kids do a lot of running. My philosophy was always that no team would be in better physical condition than we were. We were going to be in better shape, and we would beat them in the fourth quarter.”
Stamina paid off in the 1973 state finals, when Myers’ team fell behind 12-0. His Cougars scored on the final play of the first half and rallied to win 21-12 for an undefeated season.
Myers’ teams reached the semi-state in 1974 and finished as state runner-up in ‘75. He retired from coaching in 1978 after 15 years at Greenfield Central.
This year brought him several honors. He spoke at a mayor’s breakfast in his city and rode as parade marshal of Greenfield’s James Whitcomb Riley Festival.
These days, he’s enjoying retirement and tries to attend all of Greenfield Central’s home games, he said.
He still can recall his teams’ great games from the ’70s in sharp detail. But one lesson from coaching stands out most.
“You can have good athletes,” he said, “but if they don’t play together, they don’t win.”
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