Mogadore is a village divided by geography and united by football. It straddles Ohio’s Summit and Portage counties, a small portion of the village’s east side jutting into Portage County. It was just the place I was looking for but didn’t know it when my wife Jackie and I came here nearly 40 years ago. It wouldn’t have mattered had I known.
Jackie and I came with an agreement. We would move from Wichita, Kansas, to Akron, where I would become a columnist at the Beacon Journal, first Knight newspaper. Since I choose the job, and thus the place, Jackie would pick where we lived.
To her, House mattered more than place. We looked in old, established west Akron, and in a number of its suburban communities ringing the former Rubber Capital of the World. We didn’t think to look at Mogadore, which, when I came to know it, reminded me in attitude and priorities of Nowata, the small town in which I had grown up in Northeastern Oklahoma. Both are blue-collar sort of places, with community identity built around its high school and particularly football.
In the fall, football’s importance to the village becomes obvious. A person does not follow the Yellow Brick Road to come to this state of mind. Rather, he follows the wide white strip painted with green paw prints down the middle of Curtis, the street between the beautiful new junior high/high school and Mogadore Memorial Stadium. This is the epicenter of the community, its thudding heartbeat in the fall. The games may not be contested in the stadium once the Wildcats have moved on in the playoffs, as they almost always do and have again Saturday night at New Middletown Springfield High School. This is the area where a person will find many of the utility-pole banners honoring not only senior players but also their cheering support team. Homemade signs, some quite clever, dot Cleveland Avenue, Mogadore’s main north-south drag.
Some of the players on those banners through the years had have familiar names: Murphys, Adolphs, Raddishes, Kramers, Pollocks, and more. “You’re talking about a place synonymous with its football,” Coach Matt Adorni once told the Akron Beacon Journal’s Ryan Lewis. “It’s a place that’s had its ups and downs as a community, economic upturns and downturns, and the one thing that’s stayed consistent and that people can count on is football.” Mogadore does not so much have iconic players—though there have been many—as it has iconic football families. Adorni is part of one.
In his 17th season as head coach, Adorni could, in 2021, equal the record 18 seasons that Norm Lingle (150-53-1) devoted to furthering the Mogadore legacy and for whom Adorni played. In the 2018 playoffs he succeeded Lingle as the winningest coach in Mogadore history. Now, he has taken a 6-1 COVID season and 169-39 career record to New Middletown. Adorni’s 81.25 winning percentage is a smidgeon better than that of Scott Pollock (118-28 in 12 seasons) for whom Adorni played his senior season of 1992 and with whom he coached. He followed in the cleat-steps of his father who was team captain in the late 1960s and his brother who played the same role in the ’80s.
When he was inducted into the Summit County Sports Hall of Fame in 2007, Lingle recognized that he stood on the shoulders of those like Ned Norvell who came before him and started the winning (45-11 from 1951-1957) and alongside an army of support. “It’s never been a one-man operation,” Lingle said at his induction. So many people have been involved and committed to our program and our schools in the Mogadore community, and I was just fortunate enough to be there.” While Lingle demurs, he built on what Norvell had started and has been continued by Pollock and Adorni.
Mogadore has won four state championships—three since playoffs began in 1979 with a come-from-behind, walk-off 23-17 victory over Covington in Akron’s Rubber Bowl. Most amazing is its 34 playoff appearances in four different divisions (4 through 7), including 22 consecutive, according to mogadorefootball.com. When it isn’t winning, it has been consistently good against the best, finishing state runner-up four times.
In 1988, when I was Akron Beacon Journal sports columnist, I took a comparative look at the new champion on the block and the old. Akron Buchtel brought home a Division II title with a two-overtime, 28-21 victory over Steubenville on the same day that Mogadore fell to Archbold, 42-14, in the Division V championship game. Such success was new to Buchtel, while Mogadore’s players felt as if they had failed. “We thought we had it this year,” senior quarterback Jeff Meighen told me. Lingle understood: “It’s such an empty feeling. Sometimes, I think we let the losses overshadow the victories.”
I come from a place that understands this, if with lesser experience. Nowata, which I write about in a new book, Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart, has won only one state title (1970) in five trips to the state championship game, most recently, 2014. In seasons since, wins have been hard to come by and coaches have spun through the small town as if on a carousel. Short-term coaches struggle to convince young men that football matters, which is not the case in Mogadore. Since 1974, the Wildcats have had only three coaches. Such continuity provides football the glue that binds the community with extended success.
I’m no front-runner, though. I subscribe to the electronic version of the Nowata newspaper I used to deliver before it had been reduced from daily to weekly publication. I get up on Saturday mornings, go to the computer, and check the Oklahoma high school results. Though Nowata and Mogadore are about the same size in population—4,000—Mogadore schools have slightly fewer students. Its website lists enrollment at 105 boys and 102 girls; Nowata’s is 227, sophomores through seniors. The community with fewer students has more football players among them. Success breeds success.
Recognizing a place with similarities to one that has been loved won’t make it that place. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote You Can’t Go Home Again, published posthumously. And, centuries before, Greek philosopher Heraclitus expressed the concept this way: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Such thinking seems not to fit Mogadore football, and I don’t believe author or philosopher ever played the game that fills Mogadore minds.
When Mogadore lost the title in 1988, Lingle reminded his team: “The sun will shine again.” My coda then as now: The sun always shines on Mogadore and its football. I can’t go home again—until I am cremains—but I could have adopted Mogadore, even if I couldn’t live there.
