JEROMESVILLE – It’s one thing to have a championship mentality. It’s another to have a championship pedigree.
Hillsdale running back Owen Sloan has both.
When the Falcons line up Friday night against Danville in their Division VII Final Four clash at Shelby High School, the junior will be arguably the biggest threat on the field.
Sloan has been so electric during his high school career that he might have all of Hillsdale’s rushing records before his senior season even arrives.
It shouldn’t be a surprise.
Sloan’s dad, Justin Sloan, had just about as much success as a football player can have during his college career for the illustrious program at NCAA Division III Mount Union College.
A 1996 Hillsdale graduate, he was part of Purple Raider teams that finished a combined 54-1 with three national championships. Mount Union has 13 national titles, and that dominance took off during Sloan’s time at the college in Alliance, Ohio.
If Owen wants to know what it takes to win the last game of a football season, the answer is sitting across the living room.
“Ever since I can remember, I always had a football in my hand,” he said. “Then when my brother (13-year-old Mason) was born, we always played football and threw the football in the living room and the backyard.”
“Football’s always been a thing (in the family),” Justin said. “If it’s the weekend and we’re home, there’s football on TV.”
Justin admitted his career at Hillsdale wasn’t nearly what his oldest son has experienced. He said the Falcons were a combined 15-15 in his three seasons on varsity in the 1990s – more than a decade before Hillsdale took off as a perennial playoff qualifier.
He played outside linebacker and fullback for the Falcons and said he would hate to dig up his high school stats because they would pale in comparison to Owen’s numbers.
“There was one season where we were 6-4 and we had an outside chance of making the playoffs and we thought we were the greatest,” Justin said with a laugh.
Things have changed at HHS, where the program made its first postseason appearance in 2009 and is currently riding an area-record streak of nine consecutive seasons in the playoffs.
When it comes to this year’s record-shattering Hillsdale team, Justin said he knew as far back as the flag football days in second grade that this squad would be special.
He even spent a few seasons helping coach this group of varsity players when they were younger.
“That’s kind of when we realized, ‘Man, there’s a future,’” Justin said.
With all that said, there are very few college players in the entire country who have been part of more success than Sloan and his teammates at Mount Union, which also included his friend and fellow former Falcon, Nate Crosby.
The Purple Raiders blasted Rowan University 56-24 in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl (Division III championship) his freshman year in 1996. Sloan then was a contributor as a sophomore inside linebacker the next season when they eviscerated Lycoming College 61-12 for the crown.
In that 1997 campaign, he totaled 43 tackles and returned an interception for a touchdown in a national quarterfinal win over John Carroll.
A 6-foot-1, 225-pound starter for Mount Union as a junior in 1998, Sloan said the best game of his career was in a 44-24 victory over Rowan in the Stagg Bowl. He had eight tackles and a few pass breakups in that outing, then returned a year later as a senior captain.
The Purple Raiders made national headlines that season when they broke Oklahoma’s college football record of 47 consecutive wins.
By the time Mount Union hosted the national semifinal that season – again facing Rowan – the streak was at 54, the team was averaging over 50 points per game and Sloan hadn’t experienced a loss in college.
But the Profs found a way to an upset, holding down the Purple Raiders for a 24-17 win in overtime.
Mount Union went on to win another three consecutive championships from 2000 through 2002, so the Rowan defeat in 1999 broke up what could have been a run of 111 consecutive wins and seven straight national titles.
“It was a fun ride for sure, but that loss is the one game you remember, unfortunately,” Sloan said when looking back on his college career.
He finished with 243 total tackles (115 as a senior) during his time at Mount Union, where Joe Lewis – another 1996 Hillsdale graduate and the father of current Falcons quarterback Kael Lewis – also was a wrestler.
Sloan returned to the Purple Raiders in 2000 as a student assistant coach and said it was the most miserable experience he’d ever had – holding tackling dummies in practice for his former teammates instead of being on the field to avenge the Rowan loss from a year earlier.
“I was still wanting to be active and play,” he said.
He spent the next few years trying to keep his football career alive, playing in an arena league and even competing for a time in Finland.
Sloan then spent two seasons coaching in a few different capacities on the Lucas High School staff when Lewis was head coach of the program. He still jabs at Owen about the Cubs’ 28-22 win at Hillsdale in 2004.
But all that was before Sloan married his wife, Triway graduate Krystal (Watson) Sloan, and started his own concrete company — and before Owen and siblings Mason and Zoella came along.
Now, the football torch has been passed and Owen (also a linebacker on defense) has become one of the most decorated players in Hillsdale history.
The junior said he remembers going to watch playoff games at Mount Union when he was younger, then learning more and more about his dad’s career as time went by.
“I remember watching football when I was younger, the star players on TV,” he said. “And then watching dad’s film, just wanting to be like those people.”
Justin joked about needing to get out the “old VCR” to show videotapes of his days at Mount Union.
He also said Owen’s abilities at running back – including exceptional vision and speed – are far better than what he had.
“I remember distinctly a play over at Rittman in eighth grade where he fumbled on offense,” Justin said. “The very next play on defense, he was playing outside linebacker and went up to tackle the guy and just ripped the ball out of his hands and scored a touchdown.
“I was like, ‘OK, he’s got that in him a little bit.’”
Hillsdale head coach Trevor Cline said he knew what Owen would be capable of long before he arrived on the high school scene.
“When you get a player (who is raised in a family that has a winning background), you understand there are expectations at home, and expectations are a good thing,” Cline said. “We don’t want our players showing up and not having any expectations.
“Owen has earned everything that he’s received so far in his career. From Day 1 of his high school career, he showed up and he worked hard, and that’s the reason from Day 1 he was a varsity starter for us.”
A 5-9, 180-pound junior, Owen has been the leading running back all three of his seasons for Hillsdale, despite battling through various nagging injuries.
As a freshman, he was one of four Falcons to carry the ball at least 75 times for at least 400 yards (77 carries, 523 yards, 3 TDs).
Last fall, he was one of three to tote it at least 95 times for at least 430 yards (131-798-6) for Hillsdale.
With the team adding more of a passing focus into its offensive mix this season, Sloan has exploded as the running back getting the vast majority of touches.
Quarterback Kael Lewis has been able to spread out defenses with a passing game that has featured speedy receivers Hayden McFadden, Holland Young and Brock Bower.
Sloan said that passing and some great blocking from the line have helped create more and more space for him to show off his speed.
His 32 total touchdowns this season and his 42 career touchdowns already are Hillsdale records, and Sloan could end up breaking all the program’s rushing yardage records this postseason.
His 287 yards (on a career-high 37 carries) in the third round against Malvern were a new HHS standard. He then cleared 1,600 rushing yards for the season last week against Cuyahoga Heights to claim that school record as well (formerly held by Corbin Mager with 1,574 in 2012).
If Sloan can collect another 162 rushing yards, he will surpass Mager for the career rushing mark (3,089) at Hillsdale, too.
“Once the season starts, (the records) are always in the back of your mind and you think about it,” Sloan said. “But at the end of the day, it’s just about winning the game and having fun with your buddies.”
Since Week 8, Sloan has scored 16 touchdowns – at least two in every game. He’s ranged in carries this season from seven in a game to 37.
His dad said it’s been fun to watch his son doing whatever the team needs him to do to win.
“What he has been able to accomplish, I think that’s due to many things,” Justin said. “It’s his talent, the team that he’s on, the players around him. They’ve always been a great group and they’re an unselfish group.”
Owen said that moving on to play at the college level like his dad has entered the back of his mind a bit more this season, and Justin has been telling him to be open to the idea.
“He’s definitely made that next jump in his football career,” Cline said, “and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does the rest of this year and the next jump from this year to next year.”
But for now, a Final Four game this Friday night is all the Sloans are thinking about.
“I said this week, ‘How great is it that you’re going to go to practice on Thanksgiving Day?’ ” Justin said. “I remember being at Mount Union, it was awesome to go to practice and being able to drive home and see my family knowing that Saturday afternoon you’re playing in a playoff game.
“Just the whole part of it, still playing. One of 28 teams left in the whole state.”