Robinson scholarship winner Sauder rounding out stellar AHS career

ASHLAND – There’s a good chance Tyler Sauder burns 5,000 calories in his sleep.

Ask any of the Ashland High School senior’s coaches about his relentless energy and they might all have a unique recollection of his seemingly ceaseless stamina.

For AHS track head coach and football defensive coordinator Ryan Stackhouse, one recent 24-hour stretch summed up Sauder perfectly.

The senior competed in a track invitational on a Friday, had a baseball game early the next day, then helped put a roof on a house later that afternoon.

“You don’t always see someone with that much energy and drive; he’s just one of those kids that has a motor on him that just never stops going,” Stackhouse said. “Even when you’re just talking to him, you can tell he’s looking for the next thing to do.”

Ashland boys basketball head coach Jason Hess has a few of his own vivid memories of Sauder, who as a sophomore and junior was one of the best 800-meter runners around before switching to sprints this spring.

“Last year, when he was more focused on distance running, we’d get done with basketball practice in February and he’d go for a three- or five-mile run afterwards,” Hess said with a laugh. “(Assistant basketball coach Keith Vipperman) and I were like, ‘What is this dude doing!?’”

It has slowly become the legacy Sauder will leave behind at AHS when he graduates later this month – a persistently driven athlete who has refined himself into a multi-sport standout Arrow fans won’t soon forget.

Now with 10 varsity letters, a four-sport senior year and a football scholarship to Ashland University in his back pocket, Sauder recently was named the 21st recipient of AHS’s revered Roosevelt Robinson Memorial Sports Scholarship.

The honor was established in 2004 by Ashland’s Class of 1966 and is awarded annually to one graduating Arrow athlete. It is named after the legendary AHS running back who – after almost 60 years – still holds four program records.

“It’s a nice feeling when your hard work is recognized and has paid off,” Sauder said. “Just reading stuff about (Robinson), he was ‘the guy’ at Ashland, so to win something named in his honor is pretty special.”

The 6-foot, 177-pound Sauder opened his senior year last fall as one of the most critical players for one of the best teams in the history of AHS football.

The Arrows went a perfect 10-0 through the regular season for the first time since 2006 and Sauder was one of the heartbeats of the squad at both safety and receiver. He finished the 12-1 campaign with 129 tackles and four interceptions on defense, 28 catches for 438 yards and four touchdowns on offense, and added more than 500 yards combined on punt and kickoff returns.

When all was said and done, he was a second-team All-Ohioan, the Division II Northwest District Defensive Player of the Year and the Ohio Cardinal Conference Defensive Player of the Year.

Sauder said he had forgotten the OCC even picked a top defensive player until he heard the news.

“I was jumping up and down and maybe hollering a little bit,” he said. “I got excited for that. … It was pretty special, especially as a safety to win it.”

Sauder went on one stretch of the season where he had either an interception or a fumble recovery in six straight games.

He was able to clear personal goals of 300 career tackles (finished with 318) and at least one interception return for a touchdown. Sauder did that twice, including a 68-yard pick-6 in the Arrows’ Week 10 win over Lexington that sealed their first outright OCC crown in 13 years.

“My favorite play of my career was getting the pick-6 off them,” said Sauder, who also is tied for the AHS record for career fumble recoveries with six. “It’s something I’ll remember for a while. Being at home, too, that’s pretty much as good as it gets.”

“He played really well defensively as a junior,” Stackhouse said. “But when you turn around and play both sides of the ball the way he did last year – a lot of those games he didn’t come off the field offensively or defensively. … We had that kid running everywhere.”

It was without a doubt a flashy football finish for a kid who, entering his junior year, wasn’t quite sure if his best path to an athletic scholarship would be football or track.

As a sophomore, he set the Ashland record in the 800-meter run (1:55.65), an event in which he won a state title in middle school.

Then last year, Sauder was part of the Arrows’ state-qualifying 4×400 relay team alongside Gavin Hoffman, Jayden Goings and Ayden Behrendsen.

But a junior football campaign that saw him collect 100 tackles and four interceptions helped steer Sauder in that direction for college. He will follow in the footsteps of his father, Scott Sauder, a longtime AHS assistant football coach who was a four-year letterman as a safety at Ashland University.

“It was kind of hard because I had to make a decision my junior year,” he said. “Did I want to focus on track or focus on football, because playing college football and distance running in college are obviously two different body types.

“I chose the football route and it’s worked out for me so far.”

Sauder received college offers to NCAA Division II programs at Ashland, Findlay and Ohio Dominican. He said Division I Mid-American Conference schools Toledo and Ohio both offered him preferred walk-on status, but the chance to potentially play sooner at AU and have most of his college paid for made too much sense in his mind.

“He brought an enthusiasm to the game, and that leads to involving everybody else,” Arrows football head coach Scott Valentine said. “… It’s an enthusiasm that was contagious among his teammates.

“With his work ethic, I see him going to AU and hopefully having a good career in the time he’s there.”

The decision was also a bit of a full-circle moment for Sauder, who grew up going to AHS football practices with his dad.

“He was really excited about (the AU commitment),” Sauder said. “Him and my mom (Tiffany Sauder) obviously wanted me to stay close to home, but they said they’d support whatever decision I made.”

While he was finalizing his choice to play at Ashland University, Sauder was busy contributing as a second-year starter for the Arrow basketball team in the winter.

He ended up leading the squad in 3-point percentage (26 of 59, 44 percent) and closed his two seasons on varsity with more than 250 points, nearly 150 rebounds and over 80 assists.

“Some of those other guys were maybe a little more naturally gifted from a basketball standpoint or developed earlier and jumped right to the varsity level,” Hess said. “Tyler just kept sticking with it, kept competing and worked so hard.

“Basketball is one of those games, in my opinion, that when you play it the right way and play hard, it has a tendency to reward you, and that was evident last season with the way the ball went into the basket for Tyler.”

About the only thing that was somewhat questionable for him in the first half of this school year was his brief choice of facial hair after football had ended.

For a few weeks, he trimmed the beard he had been growing throughout the season into a Fu Manchu mustache.

He said it wasn’t quite his best look.

“That was so funny,” Sauder said. “I didn’t tell my mom about it and then we got our banner pictures (for basketball) and I hit the Heisman pose for it. She was so mad.”

Now rounding out his high school career – and with a much more family-approved beard – Sauder added another athletic wrinkle to his resume when he decided on a whim to both run track and play baseball this spring.

He mainly used baseball as an opportunity to compete alongside senior classmates and good friends Tyler Holt, Alex Grissinger and Michael Franz.

Mostly used as a pinch-runner, Sauder said he scored the tying run during an extra-inning game against Huron.

It’s a suitable spot for him. Now with his sights set on college football, he’s tilted his work on the track to the sprints (he said he lost nearly 15 pounds last spring running more distance).

Stackhouse, himself a former standout AU football player, said watching Sauder evolve as an athlete in multiple sports has been fun.

“He’s always outworking everybody, so he’s very capable of doing whatever he wants to do,” the coach said.

“All that time (as a distance runner) he was working slow-twitch muscle fiber, working those muscles to have endurance, not explosion,” Stackhouse said. “Now we’re trying to switch gears this year and he’s part of a 4×100 relay that not only has a chance to break a school record that we thought was going to be around for a long time, but also has a chance to make it to state.”

Stackhouse made those comments early last week. On Friday, Sauder and his 4×100 relay teammates Dakota Kruty, Jacob Holbrook and Garrett Davis set both the school record and OCC Championships record in 42.28.

Sauder will close high school with a weighted GPA of nearly 4.2 and already has some college credits under his belt after taking mostly online classes this school year through AU.

In the last two months, he’s competed in the Mansfield News Journal All-Star Classic basketball game and the Ohio North South Classic All-Star football game.

In June, he’ll line up for the North Central Ohio Football Coaches Association All-Star Classic at Clear Fork, and he plans to continue helping out in the family business, doing some more roofing.

“Me and my dad go through a couple gallons of water a day up there,” Sauder said with a laugh.

Over the last four years, sweat equity has become his identity.

“He’s the type of leader you want,” Stackhouse said. “His leadership can change a team.”