Dayton football coach’s book tells stories from the sidelines and from life

Writing about his dad, Carl Earl Ewald, was therapeutic for Ewald, a 1979 Carroll High School graduate who coached 16 years at Wittenberg and the last nine at Dayton. Ewald, now UD’s running backs coach, titled the opener chapter, “You never throw with me!” because that was the last thing he said to his dad before his death.

“The last time we spoke, he was too ill to go outside and toss the ball with me,” Ewald wrote. “If only I could go back in time and take the words back and just hug him.”

Carl, a star athlete at Chaminade High School in Dayton in the early 1940s, was 46 when he died in 1972. He was about to be named the president of the Allstate Insurance Company and had just overseen a sales convention at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City when he collapsed in the Presidential Suite, where he was staying with his wife Regina.

Mark was back home in the Philadelphia area, where the family lived at the time, preparing for a sixth grade football championship game against a rival Catholic school when he got the news. His coach drove him home, where a priest, his uncles and other assorted friends and co-workers of his dad had gathered.

“Very naive about the world and life,” Mark wrote, “I thought we were having a party. The memory is a little foggy, but all I remember was Mom explaining to us that Dad had a heart attack and went to heaven. In shock and total disbelief, I could not transmit this unreal information to my young brain, so instead I ran. Out the front door, I ran, away from this impossible twist in our lives. I just ran and cried as I sprinted to our camp a few fields away from our house in Audubon, Pa.”

Almost 50 years later, Ewald has honored his dad with this book, which also pays tribute to a number of other people. One of the contributors is former Dayton football coach Mike Kelly, who wrote a short story a backup quarterback named Jon Gruden.

Kelly met with Gruden at the end of his career for an “exit interview.” The coach asked every outgoing senior, “Ten years from now, where will you be living, and what will be your occupation?”

“I don’t know what I will be doing in 10 years,” Gruden told him, “but by the time I am 40 years old, I will be the head coach for the University of Michigan.”

Kelly thought to himself, “This young man has always demonstrated great drive, but he could not get much playing time at a non-scholarship program and he believes he is going to be the head football coach at the University of Michigan! Seriously?”

Gruden didn’t achieve that goal but did win a Super Bowl as a head coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

“Bottom line is,” Kelly wrote in the book, “keep your head down, believe in yourself and keep chopping wood and working every day. You can achieve your ultimate goals.”

Alter head coach Ed Domsitz also contributed to the book, writing about his 2008 state championship team, which overcame having to forfeit two games for using an ineligible player.

“Our kids never blamed the young man for the loss of the two games,” Domsitz wrote. “The team never broke stride. We finished the season without a loss on the field and defeated Steubenville in the state championship game. What a tribute to those kids.”

Jay Minton, the former Wayne head coach now at Dayton with Ewald on Rich Chamberlin’s staff, shared a story about the importance of balancing work on the field with a life at home. Early in his career, while coaching at Boca Raton High School in Florida, he didn’t do a good job of that, and one day when he came home, his wife was standing at the front door with their two daughters, who were wearing name tags.

“One tag said, ‘Hello, my name is Tracey,’” Minton wrote. “The other said, ‘Hello, my name is Ashley.’ My wife simply said to me that these two young ladies were so proud of me and what I was doing for young people, but they both needed a Dad, and so did our family. ... From then on, my coaching life was suddenly put into perspective.”

A number of other coaches and athletes contributed to the book, which Ewald compiled over a 15-year period, but because of space restraints, he had to leave out maybe 100 other stories. Ewald credited his daughter Jackie for urging him to finally finish the project.

“It’s been fun,” Ewald said. “These guys took the time to write. I didn’t give them too many ground rules. I had the hardest time getting them, but since I finished the book, I’ve got about 15 new ones. Now I’m working on Volume Two. Hopefully, it’s not going to take me another 15 years.”