Coach Brian Coman was unsure if he would ever get a chance to be a head high school football coach despite having been an assistant coach for 26 years. His time has finally come, as he was named Ravenna’s new football coach on June 7.
“It means a lot and I am glad that the community, the school board and the staff trusted in me to be able to come home to try and right the ship in this program,” Coman told The Weekly Villager on June 28. “Coach Jim Lunardi did a good job for years and I am trying to get back to the standards that he set.”
The 1988 Ravenna graduate returns to the program where he played as a varsity starter for four years. He takes over for Coach Joe Callihan, who resigned after two seasons, and also becomes the first African-American head football coach in program history.
Coman has served as an assistant coach at Akron East High School for 16 years, where he had a first-hand look in seeing what it took to turn a football program around.
“We were the homecoming team that everyone wanted to schedule for homecoming games and Coach Marques Hayes built that program,” he added. “We were in the playoffs or in the running for the playoffs year in and year out and that is what I want to see for Ravenna, not just for playoffs but I want to compete for state championships.”
Coman said he started playing football because of his uncle, who helped introduce him and his brother to the sport. According to Coman, he enjoyed football because it was a contact sport.
Once his body physically matured, he played outside linebacker and was a four-year varsity starter at Ravenna. After he graduated, he had offers from Findlay University and Ashland University but Youngstown State University offered him a preferred walk-on spot. He decided to accept the offer because it was more affordable. He joined the Penguins’ football program which was led by famed college football Coach Jim Tressel, who led the team to its first national championship in school history during the 1991 season, which was Coman’s junior year.
“I never heard him cuss,” Coman noted. “He really did not yell at people but he could talk to you and you understood that you were in trouble. In the locker room it seemed like when he was talking before a game, you were ready to run through a wall. He was a very smart guy too.”
In addition to winning the 1991 national championship, Coman was also a starter on the 1992 team that returned to the national championship but lost on a last-second field goal by Marshall University.
“It is amazing just to look back at it and just see the opportunity I had to do that,” he said. “I was blessed by God; like I said, I had an opportunity to go to Findlay, I had an opportunity to go to Ashland and Youngstown State. Youngstown State offered me a walk-on and I went there, and history was made.”
After graduating, Coman returned to Ravenna and became an assistant football coach at his alma matter for three seasons.
“I was happy to be back and especially happy to be back at Ravenna because I knew a lot of the guys and they were younger at the time when I was in college, but I knew a lot of them when I came back but it was nice coaching some of the guys that I already knew at Ravenna,” he noted.
He took a brief hiatus from coaching when he took a new job in Wooster but returned to the sidelines when he accepted a position in Ravenna’s probation department, and joined the Stow-Munroe Falls’ staff under former Ravenna football coach Kyle Feldman.
Coman stayed at Stow for seven seasons before moving onto Akron East in 2008. He said he planned on remaining on Akron East’s coaching staff but when Callihan stepped down, several people in the community reached out to him to gauge his interest in returning home and he decided to go for it.
He inherits a program that has experienced three losing seasons in the past four years but is determined to help restore Ravenna to its former glory by instilling the toughness and grit from the teams he played on.
“It is just about working hard and showing the kids that you care,” he said. “A lot of times if you show them you love them, they will give it all for you so I just need to show them that I care. I worry about them not just as football players but as students and people. We are going to work hard.”
