Correspondent file photo / Michael G. Taylor Cardinal Mooney’s Ike Lake (5) runs with the ball during the Cardinals’ regional semifinal win vs. Garfield last Friday at Stambaugh Stadium. The Cardinals play Girard in a Division V regional title game tonight at South Range.

More than 300 teams began the Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA) football playoffs four weeks ago. Now, with the respective regional championship games set to take place tonight, fewer than 60 remain.

Of those 60, three are local to the area – Cardinal Mooney, Girard and McDonald – and coincidentally, each of the three are led by coaches who eventually found their way back to their alma mater.

“It’s always been special to be back home,” Girard head coach Pat Pearson said. “The last 12 years have been special. To me, there’s no better job in the country, and there’s no place I would want to be. I live here, I’m from here, I raise my family here. It’s just an unbelievable place.”

Pearson, a 1999 graduate of Girard, said he did not really dream of becoming the Indians’ head coach. He figured he would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a teacher, and he thought he might also coach at the college level. And, for a time, he did, starting at his alma mater, Baldwin Wallace, before spending three seasons as a graduate assistant at Youngstown State.

But as he worked in the college ranks, he admittedly grew “nervous.”

“I saw the strain it took on those families – the coaches, their families and their kids – and I had an opportunity to kind of get back in the high school game, and I took it,” Pearson said. “And it was the best decision I ever made.”

Frank Colaprete, who is in his first season at Cardinal Mooney, Girard’s regional final opponent, had the opposite experience.

A 1992 Mooney graduate, Colaprete said when he pursued a postgraduate degree and embarked on a coaching career that he envisioned himself becoming a high school coach and athletic director. But upon graduating from Kent State with a masters in sports management, he felt drawn to college football, where he stayed for the next 26 years, including the last 12 as the head coach at the College of Wooster.

Over the years, Colaprete said he had plenty of opportunities to coach elsewhere in college or at the high school level. But none of them, aside from Mooney this past winter, felt right.

“We were happy where we were at, raising our family,” Colaprete said. “And then – the Lord works in mysterious ways – this opened up, I was contacted about the position, and that’s when we talked it over with the family. That’s kind of when I thought about coming back home and being a high school coach.

“I didn’t leave before, didn’t even think about leaving until this. This is a special place to me.”

Dan Williams had a similar thought nearly 30 years ago, when he was the 20-something head football coach at Jackson-Milton.

Williams, who had graduated from McDonald less than a decade earlier, was happy and fortunate to be a head coach, and he had not given much thought to returning to his alma mater, especially as an assistant. But then he was “sort of” promised the Blue Devils’ head job after the retirement of Andy Golubic Jr.

“I was told if I come back to McDonald – they had a teaching opening – and started teaching there, that I would be next in line to take over the position once my old coach, Coach Golubic, gave it up,” Williams said.

Sure enough, a few seasons later, Golubic retired, and Williams was offered the job. And then, things got hard.

“I learned a lot the couple years I was with [Golubic], and I didn’t feel much pressure there,” Williams said. “It was pretty simple, pretty easy, but the pressure really hit in 2000 when I got offered the job and took the job. I was the youngest guy on staff. I was 29-years old, going on 30. And all the coaches that were coaching for me then, at that point, were my coaches when I was playing at McDonald. So that really added to the pressure of wanting to succeed and wanting to do right for my home school and my village.”

The first year went well enough; not too different from Colaprete’s 2025 Mooney Cardinals, the Blue Devils went 9-3 under their young head coach in 2000, beating Gibsonburg in the playoffs before falling to state runner-up Mogadore.

But then a 5-5 season followed and a 3-7 season followed that one. It took until 2005 for Williams to record another winning season, 2006 to make it back to the playoffs and 2008 to earn another postseason victory.

“It was tough, because at that point, you got some people criticizing and wondering, ‘Hey, did they make the right move? Did they appoint the right person?’ So you start second guessing yourself, of course, as a young coach.”

Williams, though, figured it out.

From 2008-10, McDonald recorded three consecutive double-digit-win seasons, during which the Devils went 31-5 and qualified for the playoffs every year. For the next decade, McDonald enjoyed consistent success while extending its streak of seasons without a losing record to 16.

Once he decided to exit the college ranks, Pearson found his way to Warren G. Harding, where he was a Raiders assistant for four years, including three as defensive coordinator, before heading back to Girard.

“We got let go in Warren, our staff there. Coach [Nick] Cochran called me the next day, and I was home the next day in the weight room working,” Pearson said.

In 2014, after three seasons serving as the Indians’ defensive coordinator, Pearson succeeded Cochran, who stepped down to become the athletic director, and started off his head coaching career much like Williams, with an 8-3 season and playoff appearance.

Over the next two seasons, however, the Indians won just five total games.

“The first couple years, I had to fight and claw to hold on to it,” Pearson said of the head coaching job. “I was just a young kid, and it took a lot of work and determination and some blood, sweat and tears to kind of get myself established.”

In 2017, Pearson and Girard established itself with a 10-2 season and the fourth-year head coach’s first postseason victory. The following year, the Indians won 13 games and made it to the Division IV state championship game.

Pearson and Girard would soon hit a rough stretch, not too dissimilar to the one Williams and McDonald faced around the same time.

While the Indians struggled to topple the new Northeast 8 Conference’s elite, the Blue Devils suffered a three-year stretch of losing seasons, which ultimately pushed Williams to go back to the Blue Devils’ roots.

Ahead of the 2024 season, Williams and his staff re-installed the Wing-T offense, a staple of McDonald they had abandoned for the spread in 2018. The move, as evidenced by a 7-4 record in 2024 and 12-0 mark in 2025, has paid off as McDonald celebrates its 100th year of football.

“The excitement at the school has been outstanding, and the community has been outstanding,” Williams said. “Ever since we had that celebration Week 2 … I felt a different enthusiasm throughout the community, throughout the school system, amongst our players even. They wanted to make this year a special year.”

The year can only get sweeter from here.

McDonald, the top seed in Division VII’s Region 25, faces third-seeded Mogadore tonight at Boliantz Stadium in Macedonia. Meanwhile, No. 1 Cardinal Mooney and No. 2 Girard decide which team will emerge from Division V’s Region 17. The Cardinals and Indians are set to play at South Range’s Raider Stadium in Beaver Township.

The winners of tonight’s games will advance to next week’s state semifinals.