The 1917 Windham High School football team was the first in school history.

By George Belden

Portage Sports Historian Contributor

Once again, Windham is ahead of the curve in football.

The Bombers are stepping into new territory — not unfamiliar ground for a school that has reinvented the game before.

Windham is going to start playing 8-man football next season, a format designed for smaller schools that want to keep the sport alive and competitive.

Windham began playing football in 1917.

There were 14 boys total attending Windham High School, and 11 of them were on the first team, including freshman Deane Eberwine, who would be a part of Windham schools as a principal, Superintendent and coach for almost 30 years.

Windham struggled in the early years.

Between 1917 and 1939, the football teams won a grand total of 18 games, about one a year.

They did not win a single game in the 1930’s, but that was primarily because for five years of that decade, there were not enough boys in the school to even field a team.

All of that changed in 1938.

A new sport, invented in Nebraska and showcased in 1937 at the Portage County Fair, swept into the area and reinvigorated the gridiron fortunes of this tiny school on the Trumbull County border.

That sport was 6-man football.

In 1938, schools which never had enough boys enrolled to play traditional 11-man football found that they could indeed now field a team in a sport which used sneakers, cardboard pad, and, if fortunate, leather helmets.

After two years, twice as many schools, including Paris, Shalersville, Charlestown, Nelson and Deerfield, were playing 6-man in the Portage County Conference as 11-man teams.

Windham went after 6-man like hungry pit bulls.

In only the school’s second season as a squad, coached by 1920 graduate Deane Eberwine, they were declared the Ohio state champions by American Boy Magazine, the arbiter of the sport.

In their third season, not only did they duplicate that state championship, they traveled to Canada to play that country’s champions in the first international game, winning 39-1.

For nine years, the Bombers dominated Portage County, but the arrival of the Ravenna Arsenal, with its influx of workers with families, made Windham the fastest growing village in the entire United States — and overnight there were enough boys to return to 11-man football, while 6-man continued in the county until 1953.

So Black and Gold-clad gridders have battled on Ed Liddle Field for 77 years, and done so with enough success that only two schools, Aurora and Mogadore, have made more appearances in the state football playoffs.

But it takes enrollment numbers to field an 11-man team, and numbers are currently a precious commodity in Windham, one of the smallest schools in Ohio.

According to head coach Jake Eye, there are about 50 boys in the upper four grades at Windham, and half of them were on the 1-9 Bomber team this fall. At games last season, scarcely a quarter went by without an injury due to battling teams with bigger, heavier personnel. There are some talented youngsters in the junior high, but most of them are years away from reaching their full potential.

And now, an exciting option has appeared on the scene: 8-man football.

Eight-Man is not a new sport. Many states have sponsored it for years.

Ten states sanction state championship games. Michigan, for example, includes 8-man as a division in their state championships, with many of the teams coming from the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula.

Ohio has had 8-man for several years. In fact, Windham played an 8-man game several seasons ago, when Vienna Mathews had a dearth of players. It was an eye-opening experience, a speed-oriented game on a wide-open field.

And there is a 6-year-old league to play in.

The Northern 8 Football Conference, sponsored by the Ohio High School Football Coaches Association, is spread across Northern Ohio, and this year staged the very first state-championship game in Leetonia.

Playing in that game was Windham’s old Northeastern Athletic Conference foe, the Southington Chalker Wildcats, who will be on Windham’s 2026 schedule.

It’s like 1938 all over again.

Except now, Windham will become the first team in Ohio to play in a third iteration of the pigskin game.

As Eye, as adaptable a coach as can be found anywhere, says, “At the end of the day, the kids just want to play football.”

Deane Eberwine would approve.