LOUDONVILLE — The impact of one of the best high school basketball seasons in Ashland-area history continues to have ripple effects.
Less than two weeks after making it known that he will step away from his positions of athletic director, dean of students and girls basketball coach at Loudonville, Tyler Bates was announced Thursday as the Division IV Coach of the Year for the Ohio High School Basketball Coaches Association.
The honor goes back as far as 1984 for girls basketball and no other Ashland-area coach has won it. The only area boys basketball coach to claim the distinction was Northwestern’s Mark Alberts Jr. in Division III in 2017.
“I think anytime that you can be recognized for something that you put a lot of time into, it’s nice and you appreciate it,” Bates told Ashland Source on Thursday, “but when it comes from your peers and other coaches in the state that you respect and look up to and have developed relationships with, I think it means a little bit more.
“(This type of honor comes) because you have good players and really hard-working assistants. I’m grateful for them for the season that we had and it will be one that I always look back on fondly.”
Featuring Ohio Prep Sportswriters Association Division IV Player of the Year Corri Vermilya, the Redbirds and Bates put a massive stamp on the local hoops history books.
The team gathered more wins this season (26-3) than any other basketball team in Ashland County history. Loudonville’s trip to the Final Four was just the third in the nine-school Ashland area in girls basketball, joining the 1980-81 Mapleton and 1991-92 Loudonville squads.
The rest of Bates’ staff consisted of varsity assistants Rex Conway, Hannah Clark, Denny Schrock and Jeff Santmyer, and junior varsity coach Kaitlyn King. Conway was on Bates’ staff in some capacity for all 11 of his seasons leading the program.
“Tyler led Loudonville to their second Final Four appearance in school history,” said Mike Miller, the director for girls basketball in Districts 1 and 4. “He has done an outstanding job of building Loudonville into a perennial winner during his 11 years there.”
The Redbirds piled up 20-win efforts in six of the last eight seasons, as Bates became the winningest basketball coach in Ashland County history (202-69).
The team was 34-35 through his first three seasons before taking off like a rocket and winning eight consecutive Mid-Buckeye Conference crowns. The program was 168-34 overall (.832 winning percentage) during that span.
“The way things started out at the beginning of my tenure, I wasn’t sure that we would win 100 games in 11 years,” the 33-year-old Bates said with a laugh, “but we were lucky enough to have a lot of players and families become excited about Loudonville girls basketball.
“I’ll forever tell anybody that we had some of the hardest-working girls that I’ve ever met in my life during the past decade at Loudonville. … It’s not like that everywhere, but when you see the effort that so many people put in, (winning) becomes less of a surprise, but it’s certainly not something that you take for granted.”
The Redbirds and Bates will wrap their season next week with their team banquet. The coach admitted that he and his staff and players are still somewhat recovering mentally from their Final Four loss to Waterford, but said they wouldn’t trade their historic run for anything.
Moving forward, Loudonville will have plenty of change to navigate. Bates said Thursday he wants to coach next season but doesn’t yet have any potential landing spots.
The Redbirds, meanwhile, will be joining the Knox Morrow Athletic Conference next year, when they will play 14 league games (compared to just four in the MBC this season due to some scheduling alterations). Bates said the program also is likely to land in Division VII in Ohio’s new divisional restructuring.
Despite all that on the horizon, the memories from 2023-24 won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
“It was great to be around a group of people this year that all had the same goals and worked towards getting to the Final Four in Dayton,” Bates said.