Mount Union soccer soars to D3 titles with Larry Kehres within the Nineties

EDITOR’S NOTE: Our Year of the Coach sequence kicked off in August and winds to the NCAA Division III nationwide championship sport — the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl pitting North Central towards Wisconsin-River Falls — at 8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 4, in Canton. The topic of this week’s articles piloted Mount Union to 17 appearances within the D3 finals. This is Part 3 within the Larry Kehres story.

Ohio loved its share of soccer enjoyable within the 1973 season.

Woody Hayes’ Ohio State Buckeyes beat USC within the Rose Bowl to complete 10-0-1.

Young slinger Mike Phipps performed each sport for a second straight Browns season on groups that went 17-8-2.

In Cincinnati, Paul Brown’s Bengals beat out Pittsburgh’s budding dynasty for the AFC Central championship in simply their sixth 12 months as an enlargement crew.

Larry Kehres made his personal enjoyable off the crushed path. He was loving life because the 24-year-old soccer head coach of the Johnstown Johnnies.

“It was a nice little town, not far from Columbus,” he recollects. “It was exactly the place where you could be successful.”

The Johnnies had been shedding, however they jumped to 6-4 in Kehres’ first 12 months, on their manner, he believed, to the celebrities.

The youthful coach had been a senior captain on an 8-1 Mount Union crew simply three years earlier. Head coach Ken Wable didn’t overlook him.

“He had an opening and offered it to me,” Kehres mentioned. “I said no.

“Then he called again when a coach left. There were only three football assistants at Mount Union then. I thought, ‘Man, there might not be another opening forever.’

“He really wanted me to come and help him. I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’

“I really hated leaving Johnstown, but …”

He jumped in at Mount Union, in additional methods than one.

“I get here,” Kehres recalled, “and Wable says, ‘You’re either going to have to coach swimming or tennis.’

“There was no swim team. There was a tennis team.

“I’m thinking, in tennis, I’ll be compared to somebody else. So, I’ll take swimming. I’ll start from scratch.

“I could barely swim across the pool, but I recruited some swimmers and got a team going.”

He confessed to the highschool swimmers he pursued that they knew much more concerning the sport than he did.

His pitch: “We’re going to attempt to develop a superb crew, and I believe it’s going to be enjoyable.’”

A pointy younger Ohio swim coach, Kenyon’s Jim Steen, took Kehres underneath his wing. Steen was on his option to profitable 50 NCAA Division III nationwide swimming championships, break up between males’s and girls’s groups.

“He answered all my questions so patiently,” Kehres mentioned.

The Purple Raiders did not change into a pool energy in Kehres’ 12 seasons as head coach. They did have some enjoyable.

“I’d been coaching maybe eight years,” he mentioned. “We went to the OAC championships, where Kenyon hadn’t lost a relay in 10 or 15 years. Our medley relay beat Jim’s.

“I found I was a ‘better coach’ when I recruited fast swimmers.”  

By then, Kehres was married with kids.

He and Linda Pardee have been highschool sweethearts at Ravenna Southeast. She chased a educating diploma at Malone whereas he was a student-athlete at Mount Union. He was 21 when he married her in 1971. They had a son, Vince, in 1976. Daughters Faith and Jan got here alongside in 1978 and 1985.

Life was full. Linda was a grade-school teacher in the Southeast district. Larry taught classes at Mount Union in addition to coordinating the football team’s offense and piloting the swim team.

He didn’t gripe about having too much work and family on his plate. He remembered his grandpa on his mom’s side, who operated a farm.

“He had beef cattle, cows to milk, hogs, chickens, and a great big garden,” Kehres said. “The Great Depression scared him into thinking you have to take care of your own.

“My mom would say, ‘You’ve got to get out and help grandpa.’ I would say, ‘It’s going to be a hard day.’ We believed in work.”

Kehres was in his mid-30s, more than a decade into his working life at Mount Union when he was appointed athletic director in 1985. He kept the swim job but had to give up coaching football.

Wable’s football team got off to a 7-0 start without him.

“At that point, Ken told me, ‘If we win the next three games, I want to step down from football,” Kehres said.

“I had plenty to do. We’d been thinking about adding a major in sports administration to go along with health education and physical education. I went to work on preparing what that would be. I became the department chair in that and was the athletic director.”

The football team finished off the first 10-0 regular season in school history, making the NCAA Division III playoffs for the first time and beating Denison 35-3 in the first round. After losing 21-14 to Augustana in the Round 2, Wable retired as head coach.

“Mount Union had an interim president (Cliff Shields) who had been there all fall,” Kehres mentioned. “He’d spent his career working for Sohio and BP. He was a Mount Union trustee.

“We had an academic vice president who was technically my boss. He asked me, ‘As athletic director, who do you recommend for head coach?’ I said, ‘I recommend me.’

“He replied, ‘I think there should be a national search.’ I’m thinking, ‘There’s nobody in Oregon who ever heard of Mount Union.’

“I told him, ‘I’m not going to go through an interview process. I’ve been here 12 years, not counting four as a student. I worked on Ken’s football staff for 11 years. I called the plays for years. I’m ether good enough or I’m not.’”

A small group together with Kehres and Wable organized a lunch at Heggy’s in downtown Alliance. Interim president Shields joined them. It was a pleasant lunch.

“I was prepared for a different career path,” Kehres mentioned. “I knew some other directions I might go. Ultimately, the interim president stepped in and said, ‘We’re going to make Kehres the football coach.’

“I’m grateful for what he did.”

Kehres’ 1986 Purple Raiders matched Wable’s farewell season by going 11-1, with an in depth second-round playoff loss to Augustana. His subsequent three groups fell again a bit, going 6-4, 7-3 and 7-2-1.

He questioned himself at that time, placing a number of inventory in his fifth season. There had been time to recruit all the crew, refine his techniques and tradition, and be sincere about the place issues stood.

The 1990 crew made the playoffs with a 10-0 file earlier than shedding 26-15 to Dayton within the first spherical.

“That’s when I got confident,” he said. “I felt like, ‘We know what we’re doing in recruiting. We’re learning how to play on the field.’”

The 1991 team missed the tournament with an 8-1-1 record. Then the real fun began.

The 1992 Purple Raiders beat their toughest Ohio Athletic Conference rivals, Baldwin-Wallace and John Carroll, by scores of 23-14 and 24-14 in a 10-0 regular season. In the playoffs, they beat Dayton 27-10 in the first round and made it to the national semifinals before falling 29-24 to Wisconsin-La Crosse.

The 1993 team overwhelmed the OAC, winning back-to-backers over Baldwin-Wallace and John Carroll by a combined 46-7 score.

In the playoffs, the Raiders waxed Allegheny, Albion and Saint Johnson’s by a combined 126-31, putting them in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl — the NCAA Division III national title game — in Salem, Virginia, where they beat Rowan 34-24.

A dynasty was born, but that baby was the last thing on Kehres’ mind.

“The end of the game was such a wonderful few moments,” he said. “Then we get on the bus.

“My wife’s next to us in the front row. It wasn’t long before I was in my notebook.

“You’re a little fearful that maybe it won’t happen again.”

Star quarterback Jim Ballard left and spent part of 1994 on the Bengals’ roster. Mount Union lost to Baldwin-Wallace in the regular season and to Albion in Round 2 of the playoffs.

The 1995 team blew out almost everybody, including Hanover and Wheaton in home playoff games, setting up a national semifinal, at Mount Union, that turned into a 20-17 loss to Wisconsin-La Crosse, which then walloped Rowan 36-7 in the finals.

Then the floodgates opened.

The Cleveland Browns didn’t even exist in 1996, 1997 and 1998. The Mount Union Purple Raiders were the best thing going in Ohio football.

Kehres’ ‘96, ‘97 and ‘98 teams all went 14-0. In the respective Stagg Bowls, they routed Rowan 56-24, Lycoming 61-12 and Rowan 44-24. Canton McKinley was part of a Stark County vibe, winning OHSAA Division I state championships in ’97 and ’98.   

Salem was the home of the Stagg Bowl throughout that era. Kehres continued to celebrate on the field and immediately turn to “next year” on the six-hour ride back to Alliance.

“After one of the Stagg Bowls, my phone was buzzing,” Kehres recalls. “I didn’t answer it. I was busy looking at next year’s depth chart. I’m thinking, ‘We could get killed next year.’

“Linda said, ‘Answer the phone. Those are your friends.’

“I did worry that it wouldn’t happen again.”

NEXT: Before the dynasty, after a puzzling loss, Kehres didn’t know whether to punch that sports writer in the nose, or hug him.

Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com

The Canton Repository sports department can be contacted via email at sports@cantonrep.com.