About Coach Walton
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Sunday Conversation with Cliff Walton
From an August 6, 2006 article by the News-Herald's Chris Lillstrung.
When it comes to consistency and quality in area high school football, it doesn't get much better from a coaching standpoint than Cliff Walton.
This year will mark Walton's 26th season as the head coach at Hawken, during which time he has put together quite a résumé.
The Hawks have won 174 games with Walton at the helm, an average of about seven victories a season, and made seven playoff appearances, including five between 1985 and 1993. The program has had nine wins or more in the regular season 10 times and advanced to the state final four three times (1986, 1987 and 1993).
Walton has sent his fair share of players to success beyond high school—on and off the field.
He coached one of the area's all-time high school greats in O.J. McDuffie, a 1988 Hawken graduate who went on to a productive career as a wide receiver at Penn State and then in the NFL. Current Browns salary cap specialist Trip MacCracken was Walton's quarterback when the Hawks made the playoffs in 1990 and 1991.
Before the start of two-a-days Thursday, Walton sat down to discuss his long tenure, his program's consistency and greatest moments, and what fuels his desire to continue coaching high school football after all these years.
Chris Lillstrung: You're starting your 26th year on the sideline as the head coach at Hawken. When you started coaching, did you envision yourself staying at one place for this amount of time?
Cliff Walton: Boy, that's a great question. I'd probably say I didn't maybe envision myself jumping all over the place, because I'm not the kind of person that just wants to climb ladders and go all over the place. I feel much more comfortable getting in somewhere where you can actually settle in for a long period of time. I'm perfectly comfortable with what has happened here. I was at Lutheran East when I came back to Cleveland. I was in Chicago, but I came back to Lutheran East and was there for five years. I was an alumnus from there. But that school was close to closing. It since hasn't, but it has gone through some of those periods. They were going to get rid of football and close the school, and that's when this sort of opened up. If things would have been different, if that school would have been a little more solid on its feet, with Lutheran West on the other side, I might still be there. Who knows? But I'm certainly comfortable with investing in one place.
CL: Let's take a trip down memory lane. In the mid-1980s, you had the opportunity to coach one of the better high school players our area has ever had in O.J. McDuffie. You had that run from 1985-87 where you won 29 games in the regular season and got to the state final four a couple times, including a state final in '87. How enjoyable was that run for you?
CW: That was a special time for a lot of people. Yes, O.J. was doing well, and we had some good players surrounding him, because you don't do anything with just one person. It was exciting for the alumni and everybody. There's also a lot of everyday players who were involved with that who really shared in that experience with everybody put together. It was unique. When O.J. was a sophomore in '85, we were undefeated, but we didn't get a playoff opportunity. Then in '86, we finally got that first shot. We went to a state semifinal game and lost. Then in '87, we got all the way down to the 'Shoe (Ohio Stadium). That was quite a ride.
CL: That '87 team was particularly impressive. You only lost once in the regular season, to Western Reserve, and then you got all the way to the state final against Columbus Academy at Ohio Stadium. I read you saying that (the 21-0 state final loss) was the first time in about four years to that point that you had been shut out. What were your memories of that '87 season?
CW: You look at some of the performances. You mentioned O.J. being the feature there, and he has a lot of our records for receiving as well as for rushing. Philosophically, there's a question today about having unsportsmanlike conduct if the score gets too big or shortening the game or what you do with that to do away with the one-sided games. Sometimes, teams do leave in their players for a long time. O.J. accumulated a lot of these records sometimes playing just half a game. So what he did was even more phenomenal given the playing time he actually accumulated out there. There were some times where he was not happy about being taken out early. But it just wasn't fair. It wasn't right to keep him in anymore. If he would have been in there, he would have run up some really amazing numbers.
It was special. I have a unique story that threads through that. Frank Brandt was our freshman coach for Hawken when I came and up until about 10 years ago. He has since retired from here. Frank was a coach at Hawken in the mid-60s when I played at Lutheran East. Then you fast forward, and he and I are coaching here. Two of his sons then came through and actually played for me. Then my sons came through and played freshmen football for him. Then my son Dan came through and coached with his son at our middle school for a couple years. There's a lot of scenarios there that are interesting. (Frank's son) Aaron was our quarterback in '85, and he's now teaching and coaching here. It's an interesting storyline of how the two families, over several decades, have coached and come across themselves football-wise in a lot of different ways.
CL: As far as the consistency goes, during your tenure here, you've averaged around seven wins a season. You've won nine games or more in the regular season 10 times. What do you think is the biggest attribute that has allowed for that consistency over the years?
CW: It was nothing that I brought. They had been very successful. Things had gone very well. I think from 1978-80, we only lost like two or three games. So it was already in place. When I was given the opportunity to apply and got the head coaching job. I said, "I just want to try to keep this thing going." There's no question that success breeds success, and so you feed off of that when kids come through. And that's really a critical thing, so they expect to win. In athletics, that's just so important. Anybody can say they're going to win, but to really believe it and transform that out to playing, it's pretty special.
We've had great kids, really kids we've given a lot of stuff to, a lot of ownership as far as being responsible for the program and giving them a lot of freedom with line calls, defensive adjustments and things like that. You give that over to them a lot, so that they feel not that they're just given something that they have to run, but they buy into it a lot more and they're a part of it. So we give a lot of responsibility to our captains and our seniors. I think that helps a lot, because they're held accountable.
CL: With Ohio high school football, everybody surrounding it has such a passion for it. There are a lot of communities where even after the last game of one season, they start talking about next year and looking forward. What is it that inspires your passion for the game and keeps you coming back year after year?
CW: There's several things about the game. It's incredible how you can put things together in chess-match kind of schemes, matching offenses and defenses. Football is unique in that you have that brief break where you go back into huddles and you sort of re-pick something to do, and they pick something to do, and then you come out and you have to prepare for those. Some sports are continuous, and you just have to do things and it's spontaneous, whereas with football, you break down the opponent and you figure out things that you want to do. You play that game back and forth. The other thing that's unique about football is that it's in those beautiful one-week segments. If you're in a sport that plays every couple days, several times a week, there isn't that segment that says, "Here we start on Monday."
Our kids know the script. That gives them comfort, I think, in terms of learning, so it's not like, "What are we doing today?" They know what our Tuesday practice is going to be like. They know what the night-before walkthrough is going to be like. And so you have that building up, and then you have, in a perfect teaching situation, that test at the end of the week. And you get that instant feedback. Then you start again, and you get another test in another week. It's very unique. You have kids who obviously care about the sport a lot.
If you have that same thing that you try to do in a classroom setting academically, you just have that advantage, because that kid may not care for the history, or maybe the math class—for some, maybe not all—but in football, they choose to be there. They have that passion, and it's easy to feed off of that and get them to be excited about the test that's coming up.