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Perfect (so far): South Range, West Branch head into playoffs still unbeaten

Staff photos / Preston Byers. South Range’s Aidan Dominguez (left) carries the ball during a game against Springfield this season, while West Branch’s Boston Mulinix (right) goes through a drill during a recent team practice.

Of the dozens of high school football teams in the Mahoning Valley, only two enter the playoffs with a perfect record intact.

There is South Range, which completed its annual sweep of the Northeast 8 Conference and largely dominated its non-conference opponents en route to a 10-0 regular season. This is the second time the Raiders have achieved the feat in the last three years after finishing 2022 with a 16-0 record and, most importantly, a Division V state championship.

Sixteen farm-filled miles from Rominger Athletic Complex is the other undefeated Mahoning Valley team: West Branch.

The Warriors are not unfamiliar with a perfect regular season either; they went 10-0 in 2021 before falling to Ursuline in the Division IV regional final. Like South Range, which has won more than 30 consecutive conference games, West Branch is also amid a historic run, having won 10 or more games in each of the last four years.

The similarities between the two programs are evident to both coaches.

“I think that our kids in our communities are similar in the sense that we’re both rural communities with farming backgrounds, and a little bit more hard-working, blue-collar-type kids than some other places,” West Branch head coach Tim Cooper said.

David Rach, South Range’s second-year coach, said much of the same, adding that both school’s communities are all-in on athletics and have fostered “fun” atmospheres for their players.

“You can watch a team and realize when they’re having fun playing the game,” Rach said. “When you watch West Branch and South Range, it’s evident that those kids are having fun competing and they’re playing free and with confidence. I think that’s kind of a staple of coach Cooper’s program, and, hopefully, it’s a staple of ours.”

Coincidentally, both men became head coaches after an undefeated regular season. For Cooper, he earned a promotion from offensive coordinator to head coach after orchestrating the Warriors’ high-powered offense during 2021, West Branch’s best season since 1998.

Rach, a South Range alumnus, returned to high school after graduating from Youngstown State and ascended to be the Raiders’ defensive coordinator, a position he remained in during the program’s first-ever football state championship. After the magical 2022 season, Rach replaced longtime coach Dan Yeagley.

In both cases, the new, young coaches have kept the ball rolling, so to speak.

As a first-year head coach last season, Rach led the Raiders to a 9-1 regular season and the regional final before being defeated by eventual state champion Perry. In his first season as head coach in 2022, Cooper achieved the exact same result except Jefferson Area — not Perry — ended the Warriors’ season in the regional final.

While West Branch fell in the regional semifinal to Canton South a year ago, Cooper and his team entered the 2024 season with sky-high expectations but the same three goals.

“We want to win the EBC (Eastern Buckeye Conference). We want to beat our rivals. And we want to play our best football at the end of the year,” Cooper said. “So regardless of what week that is, we want to continue to improve.”

Like Cooper, Rach would like to make it to ‘Week 16’ and vie for a state title, but the South Range coach learned firsthand from Yeagley that every week is just as important as another.

“[Yeagley] did such a great job of making sure that we really did prepare the same way, week-in and week-out, for whoever we were playing against,” Rach said. “I think that continues to be kind of a staple of the program. I think our guys really buy into treating every game as if we’re in a championship game.

“That’s a skill, I think, in and of itself. It’s really hard to change and flip a switch and all of a sudden prepare like it’s a championship game if you’re not used to doing that every week.”

Judging by the scoreboard at the end of every Friday night for the last two months, both West Branch and South Range approached the regular season the right way.

The Raiders won their 10 games by an average margin of victory of 29.2 points, while the Warriors won by 36.4 points on average.

Neither coach would say they had an ‘easy’ time going through their schedule, though.

“To me, we’ve been in 10 really hard games,” Rach said. “We’ve been in some situations that are really tough. Late in the half, with Struthers, we were down 14-0 … A lot of these teams have made it really hard on us, had us on the ropes.”

West Branch’s greatest scare came just last week against rival Salem, which took a 7-6 lead into halftime against the Warriors despite having only won three of its nine games previously.

“Hats off to coach [Ron] Johnson and their game plan. They had a terrific game plan,” Cooper said. “They slowed the game down. They limited our offensive possessions. We had three offensive possessions in the first half.”

While the Warriors managed to outscore the Quakers 20-0 in the second half to complete their undefeated regular season, it served as yet another reminder — not that Cooper needed it — to never overlook an opponent.

That lesson will prove even more vital now in the playoffs, where one loss will not only sting, but it will also linger for nine months until next season begins.

Both coaches hope experience, of which West Branch and South Range have plenty, will play a major factor in their success over the next six weeks.

“Anytime you have a program that’s been around the postseason and been around championship games, they probably have some kind of advantage just in terms of the experience you know we have,” Rach said. “We have seniors right now that have played in over, I think, 54 games throughout their career. When you consider that there’s a lot of seniors around the state of Ohio that have only played 40 — we have juniors that have played in over 40 games already. So just those extra weeks of preparation are a huge deal.”

The Warriors are fortunate in that regard, as well as another.

In addition to football postseason experience — West Branch has played more than a dozen playoff football games over the past three seasons — some of the team already captured a state title this year.

The Warriors baseball team upset Division II powerhouse Hamilton Badin to win the first state championship in program history in June, an achievement Cooper and some of the championship-winning football players are confident will aid them in November and, they hope, December.

“It kind of opened up the doorway to say, we can actually do things here at West Branch — great things here at West Branch,” junior quarterback Jeremiah Thomas said.

Boston Mulinix, who scored the title-winning run in the state final nearly five months ago, knows that the baseball team did not win a championship by looking ahead, and neither will the football team.

“In the end, your goal every year is to win your last game,” Mulinix said. “But we’re just gonna take it week by week and try to win this week and see what happens after that.”

First up for West Branch is Hubbard, one of South Range’s NE-8 rivals which lost to the Raiders 38-0 in its regular-season finale.

The Raiders will face a familiar foe as well, with Navarre Fairless making the trip to Beaver Township for a second consecutive year. South Range defeated the Falcons 43-20 in the first round of the playoffs last season.

And while they will be busy with their own games this weekend, Rach and Cooper, who worked on the same coaching staff earlier this year during the Penn-Ohio All-Star game and whose teams scrimmaged in the preseason, will be hoping for each other’s continued success.

“[West Branch] is obviously one of those programs that you know is going to be in the hunt each year … and they’re doing a great job,” Rach said. “We’re obviously pulling for them throughout the playoffs.”

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