Longtime friends and Ravenna football coaches (left to right) Ed Jordan, Jake Schmauch, Brett Dubinsky and Lee Jordan.
Tom Nader/Portage Sports

By Tom Nader

Publisher and Editor

As a late-August night sky draped its darkness over Ravenna, a light billowed out from the barn of Jake Schmauch’s house.

The laughter and chatter of voices danced out the raised door like it always has.

For decades.

Football is the spotlight topic and four forever friends are holding court once again.

Brett Dubinsky, Ed Jordan, Lee Jordan and Schmauch are in storytelling mode.

Memories of games, players and unusual circumstances.

Emotions of wins, losses and everything in between, including the 1994 Ravenna Rams national championship.

And a little razzing of each other. There is always room for that.

But regardless of age, that is what good friends do.

Football helped forge a friendship between the four that will never fade.

Countless hours together night after night sharing in the love of the game, community and players created a bond so strong that not even verbal fights or threats to quit were powerful enough to break up the group.

In fact, one close call led Lee Jordan to sit outside Schmauch’s house in a lawn chair, with a case of beer, waiting for the stubborn Schmauch to come outside and make amends.

It worked and all was soon forgotten.

The power of friendships and football.

The group, all Ravenna High School graduates, coached together from 1985 through 2021. Twenty-six years all together, beginning with the Ravenna Rams, remaining when the youth football namesake changed to Ravens (don’t get Dubinsky started on that) and then onto Jim Lunardi’s high school staff in 2004.

“Some guys hunt, some guys play golf. We coach football,” Ed Jordan said.

THE BEGINNING

Ed Jordan was the first to get into coaching youth football, joining the staff of Bill Thompson’s Rootstown Wrens back in 1973.

Thompson is a football legend in Portage County. Dubinsky calls him a “giant.”

Thompson first established the Ravenna Rams, alongside Joe Meduri and Bob Nader Sr., and worked to provide the Rams all of the best, including uniforms (brown, orange and white at the time to mimic the Cleveland Browns), equipment and even would charter buses for road games.

Ed Jordan jumped over to coach the Rams alongside Brett’s older brother Dave Dubinsky, who would later go on to coach the Southeast High School program throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

Brett Dubinsky joined the Rams’ coaching staff in 1975, then coached the varsity group from 1978 to 2003.

Lee Jordan, Dubinsky’s lifelong friend, began coaching in 1976.

Schmauch, the self-proclaimed “new guy” joined the Rams in 1990.

The 1979 Ravenna Rams youth football team.
Special to Portage Sports

“I never had any intention of being a coach,” Schmauch said. “When my boys played, I would just hang around practices, pacing up and down the end zone. Eventually, I just got latched in with these guys. I am so glad that I did, though, because it gave me a lifelong connection and I feel really lucky for that.”

Their passion was imminent from the start as all four worked full-time jobs before spending every night at practice. Ed Jordan worked as a welder for Buckeye Pipeline. Lee Jordan worked for Davey Tree. Dubinsky worked for Duracote and Schmauch worked for H&M Metal Processing.

Each eventually found their own voice and coaching style, but early on, at least for Dubinsky, it was as simple as trying to follow the blueprint of the mentors he idolized so much.

“For me, all I was trying to do was emulate the coaches that came before me like Bill Thompson,” Brett Dubinsky said. “They were the example that had already been set and and laid the amazing groundwork for what Ravenna Rams football was all about. They had set the standard, and I did not want to let them down.”

Thompson was a visionary in all aspects. Uniforms, scheduling, equipment, community outreach and even 8-millimeter reel film sessions at his West Main Street home just beyond Brown Middle School.

Those film sessions eventually shifted to the second floor of Schmauch’s barn. Every Sunday night at 6 p.m.

A time to review, prepare and be friends.

A SECOND LIFE

The group credits Lunardi with giving them the boost of energy they needed.

A “second life,” according to Schmauch.

While they all still loved coaching kids, loved coaching football and loved doing it together, the opportunity to join Lunardi’s high-school staff in 2004 presented a challenge for them to try to prove themselves all over again.

“I think some of us heard the rumblings,” Dubinsky said. “The questions on why Lunardi would want youth coaches on his staff. Maybe there was a stigma that a youth coach couldn’t do the job at the high-school level. We were determined to the best we could for Jimmy and show that we belonged.”

And they did.

Lunardi knew they did and Ravenna High School began celebrating league championships together.

It extended the group’s opportunity to connect with kids and let football be a vehicle to teach them about life.

New memories to join the old ones and the names of players jump in and out of stories.

Marcus Sanders, Damien Fortson, Eric Horner, Bobby Yates, Henry Henderson, Brian Coman, Carl Dorris, Sonny Ray Jones.

Or Willie Ross, who name brings laughter from the group, as he is remembered not only for being a great player, but also for the time that Schmauch got too close and too involved in an Oklahoma drill and Ross landed on his leg and broke it.

The names seem to begin to drift off into the air. Not because any one of them lack importance, but the group can seemingly keeping naming them off effortlessly.

That is the way it goes, though, when players become an extension of family.

“When we coach a kid, it is like they become part of our families. They become our sons,” said Dubinsky, who is the only one of the group still coaching as the running backs coach for first-year head coach Joe Callihan’s staff.

“We see them later in life, they are probably in their 30’s our 40’s, but I see them as the kid that I coached. They are still a kid to me. And they are still our boys,” Lee Jordan said.

“We took pride in teaching them football, but also watching out for them,” Dubinsky said.

THE BEST FRIENDS

The group grew up playing in backyards or wherever else they could get free space and enough friends together.

Even the parking lot of the old Acme building was a football haven for them as kids.

“Ravenna football was it. It was everywhere. On Friday night for games, everyone was there. We grew up with that. It just became part of everything we did.”

Football was the constant through their youth, high school and then adult lives.

“We are friends outside of football. Our families are friends. We have fun together. When we coach together, it doesn’t feel like work, because we are basically just hanging out with our friends. And we are excited to do it all year because football never stops,” Ed Jordan said.

But not everything was perfect all the time.

“There were times we would fight like brothers, but you know what, we would always come back together like brothers, too,” Ed Jordan said.

The 1994 Ravenna Ravens youth football team that went undefeated and won the national championship in Florida.
Special to Portage Sports

Before caller ID was common, there were times they would disguise their voice when calling each other after a disagreement or blowup in attempt to allow the conversation to even get started on smoothing things over.

“That would lead to quite a bit of laughter,” Lee Jordan said.

The perfect icebreaker to bounce back from an argument.

In the end, though, it was like they all knew football would pull them back together regardless of how big the argument was.

It was easy, according to Lee Jordan, because “we all had the same common goals.”

“We all just have the mentality of getting the job done,” Schmauch said. “We all attached the same challenges with the same hard work.”

The results and the relationships took care of themselves from there.

“We met a lot of good people,” Ed Jordan said.

“Coached a lot of great kids and met a lot of great families,” Dubinsky said.

“It is special, when you are out at a place and a former player runs up to you and says, ‘Hey, coach.’ That is our pay.”

And no money could match that feeling or replace all of the memories created along the way.

“Who knows what I would have missed out on if we had not kept coaching. A lot of special times, I am sure of that, and a lot of opportunities to make a difference in a kid’s life,” Dubinsky said. “I am proud of what we did together.”

There would not have been any other way.