BELLVILLE — It’s been nearly 50 years since Bill Schaefer was thrust unexpectedly on to the sidelines as coach of the Clear Fork Valley’s first and only semipro football team.
While the details may be fuzzy, Schaefer’s enthusiasm for the team and the game of football comes through with every memory he recounts. Thick binders full of old photos, newspaper clippings and photocopied playbooks tell the story of a team beloved by its community back in the day.
The valley was already steeped in football tradition in part thanks to the annual Old Timer’s Game — a fundraiser for the high school athletic department. The Game was a face-off between the “young bucks,” who were 26 and younger, and the “old bulls.”
After two or three Old Timer’s Games, local business owner Jake Worner decided to unite the bucks and the bulls into a semi-pro football team. Worner, the team’s owner, named it the Clear Fork Wheels — an homage to his gas station and used car dealership Clear Fork Auto Sales.
“We had a tremendous, good bunch of guys,” Worner said. “They were probably from 15 to 20 different schools, but they all played football and loved to drink a beer.”
Worner tapped Schaefer, his childhood neighbor and fellow farm kid, to lead the team in 1971.
Schaefer had been one of the first All-Ohio high school football players and a member of the Bellville High School state championship team of 1957. He went on to attend Muskinghum College, where he served as an offensive tackle, then played a number of years of semi-pro football.
Nevertheless, his only coaching experience had been with an undefeated middle school football team.
“I went into this blind,” Schaefer said. “I spent many nights, working it at home, drawing plays and drawing a schedule of how we’re supposed to do stuff.”
Armed only with an iron clipboard and a love of the game, Schaefer used a stack of old plays drawn up by Fred Martinelli, who got his start coaching at Bellville High School, and ended his career as longtime head football coach at Ashland University.
The team included players from the Clear Fork Valley and across the region. Players received no compensation — only an insurance policy that protected them if they got hurt and couldn’t work. Instead, they played for bragging rights and the love of the game.
“All those guys had jobs. I had a job. But we played every Saturday night,” Schaefer said. “Practice was an hour and a half, every night of the week except Fridays, because you went to the high school football game on Friday.”
After their first year, the Clear Fork Wheels joined the Ohio Penn League. They remained in the league for five years, earning a spot in the Top 10 semi-pro teams across the country.
The Wheels went undefeated during their first year in the league, but couldn’t compete in the finals because they hadn’t played enough games. The next year they made it to the finals, losing the championship game to a team from Erie, Pennsylvania. The third year, they were league champions.
Schaefer’s philosophy was centered on fundamentals, but he also wasn’t afraid to listen to his players and make up new plays as he went along.
“Many times the players would come off the field and say, ‘We can’t run this, we can’t run that,” said Schaefer’s son, Jeff. “The guys would come over and suggest stuff to him and they would talk about it. That’s just how he coached.”
The Wheels weren’t the only semi-pro team in the region. Other teams included the Mansfield All-Stars, Lucas Travelers and Holmes County Gremlins.
The Valley proved itself to be a football community. Local businesses supported the team financially by buying ads in the game programs. The local fire station loaned the team its first-aid kit and volunteers sold and took tickets.
Worner often paid competing teams to travel, so most of the Wheels’ games took place on the old football field where Bellville Elementary School now sits. Games were on Saturday nights, tickets cost less than $2 and the hills surrounding the field were covered with fans.
“Our offensive line averaged about 295, defensive lineman might have averaged 210. And we were playing teams that were way bigger than we were,” Schaefer said. “But our guys, they came to play.”
Schaefer said it was the overall cohesiveness of the team that gave the Wheels their edge. Despite differences in age, hometown and background, the players got along and often bonded over a post-game beer (and perhaps a pre-game beer, too).
“I was very fortunate to have the players that I had. It wasn’t me that made that or it wasn’t any one person,” Schaefer said. “It was a team, because it took us all to do our job to win it and we did. We played good and we had fun.”
“They were all good ballplayers. There were no dummies out there.”
During the third year in the Ohio Penn League, the team began recruiting players from among the guards and inmates at the Ohio State Reformatory.
“This was the original Longest Yard. You had guards on the team, you had inmates on the team. And you had citizens on the team,” Schaefer said. “We went right out to the Reformatory and picked them up in a school bus. I had all them guys in my house.”
One day, when the team was eating lunch at Bill’s home, a handful of players from the Reformatory wanted to walk to the grocery store. Bill warned them to stay out of trouble, then let them go.
Schaefer could only recall one incident when a player from the Reformatory gave him trouble. The inmate formulated a plan to feign an injury and sneak out of the locker room, but someone clued Schaefer in. As the player limped off the field, Schaefer turned to follow.
Leaving about 10 yards between himself and the player, he quietly tailed him through the locker room, waiting to call out his name until he was reaching for the door handle.
“Johnsie!”
“What are you doing, coach?” the player asked.
“I come down to get you,” Schaefer replied at the time. “You open that door and you open the door to the hole.”
“I know what you’re doing or I wouldn’t be standing here. Now I highly suggest you get your butt back up there. You play the rest of the ballgame and I’ll forget this happened.”
Schaefer added that if he didn’t return to the field, there were men on the other side of the door ready to apprehend him. The player dropped his head and walked back through the locker room to the football field.
“That was the end of it,” Schaefer said.
Schaefer coached the team for four years, until a change in his work schedule at General Motors prevented him from continuing. The team fizzled out a year later.
Schaefer and Worner would love to see another semi-pro team in the Valley, but noted that it would take a lot of effort, coordination and cooperation to pull it off.
“It must have been the right time to make it all work, you know, because there’s a lot of stuff that had to work right to make something like that happen,” Schaefer said of the team. “A lot of cooperation from a lot of people and especially the players. We had a good bunch of guys we really did.
“You look at the pros today, they’re always fighting and arguing among ourselves. Well, we didn’t have that.”
