Ashland’s legendary 2006 football season celebrates 20th anniversary

ASHLAND — The universe couldn’t help but give the 2006 Ashland football team a second glance. Then it slipped the Arrows a few slices of destiny.

With that unforgettable season now 20 years in the rearview mirror, it’s impossible to look at the bottleneck of events that unfolded and see it any other way.

“You don’t really think about it when you’re a kid, but then you look back and it was a perfect storm,” said Taylor Housewright, the junior quarterback for AHS in 2006.

“Everything led up to (a big season) and the perfect amount of expectations for ourselves and for outsiders.”

The Arrows went into the season riding the motivation of playing their 100^th year of football — and doing so on a brand-new turf surface at Community Stadium that was the envy of most schools within an hour radius of Ashland County.

They had deep junior and senior classes filled with players who were seething after a 5-5 letdown of a season a year earlier.

The Rolodex full of things the Arrows accomplished by late November is now carved into the program’s identity:

• First 10-0 regular season.
• First Ohio Cardinal Conference title.
• First (and only) Associated Press state poll title.
• First home playoff game.
• First playoff win.
• First 12-win season.
• First regional championship game appearance.

“I can remember the kids coming in (for summer practice) and saying, ‘Hey, we were just at Hawkins (market) and everybody’s excited about the 100^th year,’ so they were hearing that every time they were out in the community,” said Dan Fuller, Ashland’s defensive coordinator from 2002 to 2010.

“That group wanted to do well, and as the year progressed, they took it on their shoulders that they were representing the community and the school and they wanted to do all the right things.”

In his fifth season as Ashland’s head coach, Scott Valentine was named the Division II Coach of the Year.

Housewright was a first-team All-Ohioan – one of seven all-staters on the squad alongside linebacker Shadron Starnes (first team), wide receiver Brandon Harris (second team), nose tackle Luke Rogers (second team), lineman Kurtis Carman (special mention), running back Dan Icenhour (special mention) and safety/wide receiver Tyler McFarlin (special mention).

“I just think of everything — from our coaching staff to our players — just everybody pulling in the same direction,” Rogers said. “That sounds kind of boring, but it’s extraordinarily hard to do in big organizations.

“When everybody works together and you get everything going in the right direction, watch out, because special things are gonna happen.”

Bouncing back

The Arrows had 26 seniors in 2006, not far off their program-record (30) from two years earlier.

Valentine said their frustration from being 5-5 in 2005 — losing three of their last four games — was a motivator for months leading into the breakthrough 100^th season of football.

“We had been successful my first three years (combined 21-10 record and a playoff appearance), then we had a letdown year in 2005,” Valentine said. “Yeah, it was 5-5 and we didn’t have a huge group of seniors that year, but there was an expectation that we had to get back to winning again.”

The 2006 seniors had finished 9-1 when they were freshmen. That same year (2003), many of them went to Ashland’s first-round playoff game against eventual state champion Avon Lake.

It was just the second playoff appearance ever for the Arrows (previously only 1987) and it left an impression on the 2006 seniors.

“We wanted to get back there,” Starnes told the Ashland Times-Gazette during the 2006 season. “And this is the year we wanted to do it.”

The Arrows’ middle linebacker, Starnes led the team as a junior with 136 tackles, but Ashland allowed 21.5 points and more than 300 yards per game that season.

Offensively, meanwhile, they averaged nearly the lowest yards per game of any Ashland-area team (247.8) in 2005. Housewright started every game at quarterback as a sophomore, but he completed less than half his passes (53-of-111) and threw more interceptions (7) than touchdowns (5).

Actually splitting time with another quarterback, he also was the team’s second-leading receiver, so the only actual returning receiver in 2006 with any varsity catches was Andrew Spicer (30 catches, 364 yards).

Despite the less-than-compelling returning numbers, Valentine still had Icenhour coming back (167-799-5 as a junior), and he felt Housewright was prepared to take full control of the offense.

He said the junior had spent more time working in the offseason with receivers on dropback passes than any quarterback he’d ever had.

“With Taylor’s arm, we had to make sure that was a weapon for us,” Valentine said.

“I owe an apology to (former Ashland boys basketball head coach) Rob Lavengood, because we would throw on Sundays during basketball seasons, starting as sophomores,” Housewright said. “We were addicted to it and we kind of decided, ‘Hey, if we’re gonna do this, we’ve gotta work at it and we’ve gotta work a lot.’

“I’d bring them out there as many times as I could to throw and work on timing.”

The Arrows ended up splitting their offensive attack nearly right down the middle during the regular season in 2006, passing 51 percent of the time for 1,672 yards and 20 touchdowns while running the ball 49 percent of the time for 1,587 yards and 15 scores.

The Ashland defense, meanwhile, kept half its regular-season opponents to eight or less points while giving up just 201 yards per game.

“It was just a matter of us getting some confidence early that allowed us to move from there and keep getting better,” Valentine said.

Defensively speaking

Despite all the accolades he collected during his playing career — including a repeat first-team All-Ohio selection as a senior and All-American status as a quarterback at NCAA Division II Ashland University — Housewright refuses to take too much credit for the 2006 run.

The defense, he says, is what chopped the wood that fall for the Arrows.

“They ran the show and we were just there on offense making sure we didn’t screw it up,” Housewright said.

Starnes, Rogers and outside linebacker Curt Gillespie were Arrow captains that season, so the team’s fierce, punishing defensive identity only made sense.

Rogers now runs the junior high football program at Lexington and has been coaching in some capacity nearly every year since graduating from Ashland University.

In the first six games of 2006, he helped the Arrows limit their opponents to just 40 points.

“We knew Taylor and all the other guys were gonna get the offense rolling, but we just said, ‘Until they get up and running, we’ve gotta be lights out,’” said Rogers, who was named the North Central Ohio Football Coaches Association “Big Division” Lineman of the Year.

“Looking back on it, as a coach now, it’s probably one of the best coaching jobs I’ve been around. Fuller, John Saccomen, Scott Sauder, Jim Deppen and Larry Hachtel – that defensive staff coached us well.”

Fuller said high school football in Ohio was just starting to open up and spread out defenses more via the pass game at that time. Those adjustments led him to revamp the Ashland defense ahead of that 2006 season to make it more flexible.

He said he had to have a versatile, athletic and — most importantly — intelligent group to make the changes.

Starnes was the linchpin. Fuller said because of the senior’s deep understanding of the game, he could get the Arrows into any front they needed, based on how the opposing offense lined up.

It wasn’t just a situation where Ashland might have four or five guys on the line and hope for the best.

“It was complicated to put in, but what was special about that group is they just were extremely intelligent in the classroom and on the football field,” Fuller said. “And they were all really good friends on and off the field, so that made that group very easy to coach.

“It got to the point where Shadron was just another coach on the field and he understood exactly what to get us in depending on what offensive formations we saw.”

Starnes, who has since gone on to a career in the FBI, finished with 202 tackles that season. It’s the only single-season Ashland record from 2006 that still stands today.

“He was so smart, and I’ve never seen that even as a college coach,” said Housewright, currently the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at NCAA Division I Jacksonville State – his ninth different stop in the college coaching ranks.

“(Fuller) would call like a check and Starnes would have four or five defenses he could get to based on the formation. So we were always in the perfect defense.”

The only time the AHS defense allowed more than 18 points in the regular season came in overtime wins at Mansfield Senior (28-27) and Clear Fork (27-21).

The Ashland unit allowed just a touchdown to Tiffin Columbian in a 14-9 regional semifinal win, then permitted just two touchdowns to eventual state champion Piqua the next week in the regional championship game.

That night, the Arrows lost 27-0, but the Indians scored off two turnovers. Their star running back, Ohio’s Mr. Football, Brandon Saine — who followed his career at Ohio State with time as a Green Bay Packer — mustered just 39 yards on 14 carries.

Senior defensive end Matt Lewis finished with 14 sacks that season while both Rogers and budding sophomore and defensive tackle Cody Fast had nine.

As a comparison, in 2005, Lewis led the team with three sacks.

“They never really cared about individual accolades and playing time,” Fuller said. “Sometimes we would change personnel week-to-week depending on who we were playing. … They understood the big picture.”

The Arrows allowed 14.2 points per game in 2006. The program hasn’t had a better scoring defense in the 19 seasons since.

“We did everything we could to go 100 miles an hour,” Rogers said.

Setting a standard

As much credit as the defense deserved for 2006, the offense was just as balanced and potent.

Housewright was the first Ashland quarterback to ever clear 2,000 yards passing in a season, most often leaning on Brandon Harris, who set what then was the program record for single-season receiving touchdowns (13).

Amazingly, almost half of Harris’ 28 receptions went for scores that year. He averaged 21.5 yards per catch (601 total receiving yards).

Juniors Tyler McFarlin (36-406-4) and Logan Kerr (39-471-2) also were constant threats, combining to lead the Arrows in receiving yards in nine of the 13 games while also starring in the secondary.

Dan Icenhour reached 1,001 rushing yards and eight touchdowns as a senior and Housewright ran for 548 and seven. Both of them benefited from playing behind a starting offensive line that never changed – left tackle Kurtis Carman, left guard Noah Heath, center Neil Stevens, right guard Drew James and right tackle Cody Wolf.

“All those guys, we grew up together in the streets of Ashland playing wiffleball and baseball and soccer and basketball,” Housewright said. “We were all real close and my class knew the seniors real well, so we had all competed together our entire lives.”

“I think that’s what makes high school sports special – growing up with guys like that and believing in something and having an unshakable faith that, ‘You know what, we’re gonna be good,’” he said. “You don’t have any reason why you think that, you just think it.

“I think as adults we could use that naive faith sometimes.”

All told, the Arrows beat seven teams with winning records in 2006, four of which were playoff teams. In the last 20 seasons, Ashland has had a winning record 15 times, with double-digit wins six times.

Prior to 2006, it had taken the Arrows 41 years to collect 15 winning seasons, and they had never won more than nine games in a year.

“To fall back to 5-5, it could have easily just kept going that way (after 2005),” said Valentine, entering his 21st year as head coach at Ashland. “That 2006 season, it was, ‘OK, we’re not going the other way – we’re going forward.’

“That set us up for years to come and made it easy on me as a coach. I could say, ‘Here are the types of seasons you can have, so which one do you want? You have to make that decision as a group.’

“Since then, we’ve had a lot of groups choose to (be winners).”

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