Good read. Obviously came out before Mentor as KO'd from the playoffs. Forgot that he and Ted Ginn Sr. went head to head in both their HS Head Coaching debuts.
Steve Trivisonno: Why is legendary Mentor football coach leaving after this season?
Mentor High School football coach Steve Trivisonno through the years
By Terry Pluto, The Plain Dealer
MENTOR, Ohio – How can Steve Trivisonno quit as Mentor’s football coach after this season?
His undefeated football team is ranked No. 1 in the state in Division I.
Max Preps rates his Mentor Cardinals as the No. 13 team in the country.
Want more? Max Preps also ranks Mentor as having the No. 7 freshman team in the country.
The point: Mentor is very good now, and probably will be very good for several years.
That’s especially true with quarterback Ian Kipp, who is only a junior. He has several Division I scholarship offers from Mid-American Conference schools and other colleges.
So why would Trivisonno retire at the end of this season?
He’s only 56. He’s healthy. There is no family or personal crisis. The intense Mentor fans don’t want him to leave.
“I never wanted to stay too long,” said Trivisonno. “The kids work too hard to have a coach who doesn’t give them everything he should.”
Trivisonno is certainly not at that point right now.
His career record heading into this weekend was 205-69 with 15 trips to the playoffs in 22 seasons. Mentor has clinched another playoff berth next week.
Four times, his teams have been to the Division I Finals, losing each time.
“Steve has a great program,” said St. Ignatius Coach Chuck Kyle. “It’s not just the winning. He teaches his kids the right way to play. He’s a terrific role model.”
Kyle’s and Trivisonno’s teams play every year in the regular season, with Mentor winning 38-31 this season. The Division I Ohio superpowers also have bumped into each other in the playoffs.
The 69-year-old Kyle has been been the head coach at his alma mater for 36 years, winning 11 state titles.
“Steve is a teacher first,” said Kyle giving what he considers the highest compliment to a fellow coach.
He meant more than Trivisonno being serious about the health courses he taught until retiring from teaching in 2016.
“It’s molding young people,” said Kyle. “That’s the most important part of the (coaching) job.”
WELCOME TO THE OFFICE
We talked in Trivisonno’s modest and coach-sloppy office next to the locker room, under the stadium stands. It smelled a bit of old sweat and practices of long ago. It’s furnished with some chairs bandaged up with duct tape.
Trivisonno laughed about his setting.
“It’s high school,” he said. “It’s about the kids, not the office.”
Coaches always say “it’s about the kids.” They insist winning is important, but stress building character matters more.
In Trivisonno’s office, where his assistants also change, there are some old lockers. There is a huge white board. There are no trophies. No pictures of the coach with famous football figures.
Nothing designed to impress, but there is a very messy desk next to a huge fuse box.
It makes a statement about what the coach deems important – and what he does not. Even at the high school level, some coaches are looking to build up their record and move on to a better job.
Then consider why Trivisonno decided to retire after this year.
“I could have gone one more,” he said. “My wife (Pam) and I talked about that. Ride the quarterback (Kipp) and know we’ll have a good team again next year.”
Makes sense.
“But then my wife and I talked about it,” he said. “If I leave now, the new coach takes over with a quarterback in place and some good players. He should be in good shape. It gives him a chance to be successful.”
He paused.
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said.
NEXT IN LINE
Mentor has not announced who will replace Trivisonno, but it’s clear who is being trained for the job.
It’s 32-year-old Matt Gray, the offensive coordinator and offensive line coach. Trivisonno has been taking him to booster club meetings. He’s showing Gray what it means to be the coach at Ohio’s fourth-largest high school.
“It’s more than football,” said Gray. “It’s about the city of Mentor. It’s pride in the school and the team. It’s spending time with the junior high and youth coaches.”
It’s a coach truly bleeding Mentor Cardinal red.
Gray actually attended Avon, which tells you how highly he’s viewed by Trivisonno. The protege has taught special education in the Mentor school system since 2013. He has been adopted into the Mentor football family.
“We have a sharp young guy right here,” said Trivisonno. “He’s ready.”
BEING AN INTERIM
If Gray is hired to replace Trivisonno as head coach in 2020, he’ll be 33. Trivisonno was 34 when he took over as head coach in 1997.
But circumstances are different.
Trivisonno had been an assistant coach and elementary physical education teacher in the Mentor district from 1988-95. He was a candidate for the head coach’s job after the 1994 season, but Mentor hired another assistant coach, Mike Pavlansky, instead.
In 1996, he went to Riverside High as defensive coordinator. The next summer, he got a call from Mentor.
“The coach had just left,” said Trivisonno. “Practice was starting in a few days. They asked me to come back as head coach...as an interim.”
Trivisonno loved Mentor. Interim or not, he was taking the job, even though he knew the program was not in good shape.
Mentor struggled that season, finishing 4-6. The Cardinals played a demanding schedule. He was hired as the permanent coach after the season.
Trivisonno didn’t say it, but it’s clear he wants Gray to be in a far superior position at Mentor than what he inherited.
TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL
Nes Janiak has been involved in Mentor football for 44 years. He now serves as Trivisonno’s quarterback coach.
“When I taught at Ridge (Junior High), I had Steve in class,” he said.
Really?
“He was a very quiet, respectful kid,” said Janiak. “I coached him in (junior high) football. He was a quarterback and a safety. He was one of those kids who wanted to do the right things.”
That matches the memory of Pam Trivisonno, his wife of 33 years.
“I first met Steve at Mentor,” she said. “We were both in the 11th grade. I had just broken up with someone. My friends said Steve would be good for me. He was very stable.”
And quiet. Very quiet.
“When you see him at games on the sidelines, it’s hard to believe you couldn’t get three words out of him when he was in high school,” said Pam. “But he was steady, reliable and I needed that.”
Pam said she grew up in a single-parent home led by her mother. Steve came from “a good family, two parents, very stable. That was important to me.”
Trivisonno, a 1981 Mentor grad, played safety well enough to earn a Division I college scholarship to Bowling Green.
“I decided to go there first,” she said. “I tell everyone he followed me. When we got out of school, I had my accounting degree and got a job in Cleveland."
Trivisonno wanted to teach and coach. Pam jokes he also followed her back to Mentor.
“He did want to coach at Mentor,” she said.
THE URBAN INFLUENCE
After taking over as head coach, Trivisonno had the goal of turning Mentor into one of the premier programs in Ohio.
But how to do that?
“One advantage we had was numbers," he said. “Our school was big. We had a lot of kids who wanted to play. We could play two-platoon football."
After having a 4-6 record in his first season, Mentor made the playoffs the next two years. But Trivisonno realized his team needed to do something different to compete for a state title.
By 2000, a few college teams were running what we now know as “the spread offense.” Very few high school teams used it. Trivisonno tried it to a limited degree in 2000.
At that time, he became friends with a young college coach named Urban Meyer. He was an assistant at Notre Dame, recruiting some of Mentor’s players. He was an advocate of the spread offense.
In 2001, Meyer became the head coach at Bowling Green. Trivisonno spent three days with him, studying the new approach to offense. He came back to Mentor with a fast-paced, no-huddle approach. Quarterback Thom Abbott was always in the shotgun, taking a long snap from center.
THE MENTOR WAY
“Early on, we were throwing the ball all over the place except where it should go,” he said. “In our first scrimmage, we didn’t score a point.”
Trivisonno was sold on the system. Soon, Mentor was piling up 40 points.
Then the weather turned bad. Mentor faced a veteran coach.
“It was a pouring rainstorm,” said Trivisonno. “The coach said no way we could throw the ball in that wind and rain. It would never work. I told our offensive coordinator not to run the ball once in the first half. We put something like 40 points on the scoreboard.”
Trivisonno talked to the youth and junior high school coaches in Mentor. Soon, everyone was running the spread offense. By the time players reached high school, they were indoctrinated in the new football gospel.
“It’s common now,” he said. “But it gave us a real competitive advantage back then.”
It also produced quarterbacks such as Bart Tanski (2007) and Mitchell Trubisky (2012), who both were named Ohio’s Mr. Football. Trubisky now starts for the Chicago Bears.
Mentor has 110 players on the varsity, another 47 on the freshman team. Trivisonno said he has a no-cut policy as long as players follow the rules.
TED GINN & TRIVISONNO
“We both became head coaches in 1997," said Glenville Coach Ted Ginn. “Our first game was against each other.”
Final score: Mentor 29, Glenville 8.
They have played about every year since then.
Ginn played football at Glenville. He had a vision of turning the Cleveland Senate School into a power while also having his alma mater change the lives of the young men under his care.
“Steve and I share that,” said Ginn. “We are like brothers. Some years, he beats me. Other years, I beat him. But in other games, we root for each other."
Ginn and Trivisonno are an intriguing pair. Ginn is African-American from an inner-city Cleveland School. Trivisonno is white from a suburban school. Both have dueled Catholic schools in the playoffs, often losing.
“I tell the kids that I can give you a full scholarship to Mentor,” said Trivisonno. “But Ted and I look at it the same way. We’ll play anybody, private or public.”
Like Trivisonno, Ginn has done everything on the football field but win a state title.
“We win state titles all the time,” Ginn said. “You just don’t see them. It’s about saving lives and changing lives of the young men.”
Ginn said it’s also the players knowing their coach isn’t looking for a bigger job, that he is committed to his school.
“You don’t see that a lot these days,” said Ginn.
WHY HE STAYED
Trivisonno had chances to move up to the college ranks, but never seriously considered it.
“Pam and I have two daughters,” he said. “We didn’t want to start moving all over the country. That can happen if you’re a college assistant.”
He has same coaching DNA as friends Kyle and Ginn – guys who went back to their old high schools and stayed there. They didn’t need big paychecks or the national spotlight to massage their egos.
Pam has an accounting firm in Mentor.
“I’d take our daughters to practices,” she said. “Mentor football was a part of our family. We got to know the kids and parents. You don’t get that if you go from job to job.”
Trivisonno said his goal was to turn Mentor into a program that can compete for state titles and play a demanding schedule against some of the best competition in Ohio.
He has achieved that and leaves the elite program ready for the next coach.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Trivisonno said he plans to take a year off.
His two daughters (Tori and Kari) are teachers and coaches living in Columbus. Tori is a cross country coach, Kari is a soccer coach.
“They got that from their father,” said Pam. “We can spend more time visiting them.”
Mentor has two 2019 grads (Noah Potter and Ryan Jacoby) who are playing at Ohio State. Pam and Steve can combine family visits with time to watch Buckeye football.
“I never got to go to college games because I was always busy with my own teams,” said Trivisonno. “I have players and coaches in a lot of places, and I’d like to go see them.”
Trivisonno talks about forming some type of consulting business to help young coaches. At this point, he doesn’t seem interested in coaching again, at least not as a head coach.
Meanwhile, he is taking one last shot at a state title.
“You always want to win,” he said. “It would be great for community. But a state title doesn’t define you. It’s seeing the kids in the ninth grade turning into young men fours years later."
He paused.
“We want a great football program in Mentor,” he said. "It’s become a football town and I’m proud of that. But it’s about more than that. It’s going to their weddings. It’s watching them grow into men who take care of their families
https://www.cleveland.com/highschoolspor...his-season.html
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worth it!