John Cullen

CANFIELD — Canfield head boys basketball coach John Cullen says he has stepped down from his post after 30 combined years helming the Cardinals’ program and more than 50 years coaching.

Cullen coached Canfield for 28 years in his first stint and returned for two more seasons in 2022. In his half-century-long career, he also served as an assistant or head coach for multiple area teams, including Brookfield and South Range, as well as an administrative assistant for Youngstown State University’s women’s basketball program.

Now at 73 years old, Cullen, who left open the possibility for a “part-time thing,” said that he no longer wants to be a head or assistant coach and expend the time and energy either job requires.

“I just don’t want the time commitment,” Cullen said. “I know how much time I’ve been putting in for the last several years. I really don’t want to spend as much time as I did.”

Cullen, bolstered by a talented senior class, led the Cardinals to this year’s Division II regional championship game, where Canfield lost to Ursuline in an all-area playoff showdown. Canfield finished the season 23-5, despite being without star center Jake Schneider the entire year.

When he returned to Canfield in 2022, Cullen planned to only coach one more year. After going 20-6 and falling in the district final, though, the allure of leading players like Schneider, Dom Cruz, Sam Castronova and Tony Russo proved too enticing to pass up.

Cullen said he feels “comfortable” leaving the Canfield program at this point, with the varsity team returning multiple rotation players and the freshman and middle school teams showing promise.

Despite having tried to shake the coaching bug behind a few times — he left Canfield in 2010 to become the director of women’s basketball operations at YSU before eventually returning to the high school sidelines — Cullen insists he is not coming back to coach again.

“[Canfield’s administration] already kind of left that window open for me if I was ready to come back. They said, ‘Is there gonna be any change of plans? Are you sure this is it?’ And I said, ‘No, this is it. I’m not changing my plans,'” Cullen said. “Sometimes I’d like to be able to take a vacation other than just the window I have in August and the window I have in April or May. My wife deserves a little bit of that travel opportunity that we haven’t had a whole lot of in the last 50 years.”

Cullen began coaching in 1973 and had stops at Brookfield and Badger before taking over at Canfield in 1982. After becoming an off-the-court assistant in the YSU women’s program, then led by current Ohio head coach Bob Boldon, Cullen took the boys head coaching job at South Range, where he stayed until 2021. He spent one season as an assistant for Jeff Brink at Springfield before returning to Canfield.

The Canfield Local Schools District posted a job listing March 19 for a varsity head basketball coach, which has an application deadline of April 26. If Cullen had his way, though, current Cardinals assistant coach Andrew Vlajkovich would be the next head coach.

“I would love to see Andy get the job because it’d be an easy transition. He’s already spent a whole year here and he was one of my players,” Cullen said. “That’d be wonderful if he was the person because he really has a very good basketball mind and he picked my brain for a whole year here also. I just like to see good people that do things the right way get rewarded for it with those kinds of jobs.”

Vlajkovich spent six seasons as the head coach at Warren G. Harding before leaving to become Canton McKinley’s head coach in 2018. Vlajkovich, the 2021 Federal League Coach of the Year, resigned from his coaching job at McKinley in March 2023 and became an assistant on Cullen’s staff before this past season.

Whether Vlajkovich takes over the program or not, Cullen said he will be sticking around the game he’s dedicated more than two-thirds of his life to in some shape or form.

“I’ll still go to some games and I’ll still be around because it’s a part of me, it always has been a part of me, but not as much as it used to,” Cullen said. “I hope to do something in the basketball world, but I don’t know what it’ll be.”

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