One thing they did have was rocks. Lots of rocks.
When Archbishop Alter opened as a high school in the fall of 1962, it only had 250 freshmen.
Two of them were Jim Stangle and Bob Vari, who joined the fledgling football program led by Coach Bill Rankin, who’d come from Springfield Catholic Central.
“It was a real barebones deal at first,” remembered Vari.
Alter now has its football field right behind the school, but that first year the property around the new school was more like a construction site.
“We’d come out for practice and first we’d pick up rocks,” Vari said with a laugh. “Then we’d walk over and cross Marshall (Road) to get some grass at Irelan Park.”
“That first year we mostly did calisthenics and some tackling practice, basic things,” Stangle said.
Near the end of that first fall, Vari said, they did have a scrimmage with Catholic Central. By then Alter parents had raised enough money that at least the 11 guys on the field had helmets to wear.
“We shared those helmets back and forth between our offensive guys and our defense,” Vari said. “We did whatever we could to play.”
It’s memories like that that will make Saturday’s gala reunion at the high school – called “The Legacy of Excellence: 60 Years of Alter Football” – even more meaningful for the nearly 300 former players and coaches, present day coaches and Knights’ players and many of the friends of the program who signed up for the evening.
Along with a dinner, there’ll be film tributes, remarks by current Knights’ coach Ed Domsitz and others, and a keynote address from former Dayton Flyers head coach and now UD administrator, Mike Kelly.
In six decades, Alter football has gone from lots of rocks to plenty of renown.
It’s one of the best-known, most-accomplished high school football programs in the state.
It has two state titles, four state runner-up finishes and 29 state playoff appearances including an ongoing streak of 24 in a row.
The Knights have had some 200 players go on to play college football and some – like Jeff Graham, Nick Mangold, Chris Borland and Joe Thuney – have made an impact in the NFL.
Mangold made seven Pro Bowls in his 11 seasons as a New York Jets center. Graham was a wide receiver for 11 seasons with five different NFL teams. Borland, a San Francisco 49ers linebacker, made the NFL All-Rookie Team and then retired.
And Thuney, who’s just 32, already has won four Super Bowl rings, two with New England and two with Kansas City. Last month the Chiefs traded him to the Chicago Bears.
Thuney and Graham will be at Saturday’s gathering as will Yari and Stangle, the first two stars of Alter football.
Stangle, who’ll speak at the event, was an All-Ohio offensive tackle, who also played defense. He was the team captain and co-MVP of the 1965 team, the first at Alter that included seniors.
He’s in the Alter Hall of Fame, as is Vari, who was the big-play, wide receiver target of stellar quarterback Mike Fisher. He also was a standout basketball player.
Turning down scholarship offers from numerous big-time programs – including Notre Dame and Ohio State – Stangle went to UD, where he started three seasons and is in the UD Hall of Fame.
Vari was one of the last two-sport scholarship athletes at the University of Louisville, where he played basketball for a season and football for four. He now lives in Kettering and owns the Cloud 9 Mattress Outlet on Wilmington Pike.
Stangle and his wife Judy live in Bel Air, Maryland, northeast of Baltimore. Their two sons, Matt and Ryan, both played football for the Flyers.
Vari and Stangle, both 77 now, remembered in clear detail the game they believe was the cornerstone for all the football excellence that has come to Alter in the decades since they played.
“I firmly believe the game we had with Chaminade in 1965 was the most important game in Alter history,” Stangle said. “Until that time, our credibility in football was not very high.”
Vari agreed: “That was the game that propelled us forward to all these great moments that have come.”
To understand the importance of that season-ending game played in the November rain and mud at Baujan Field in front of an overflow crowd of 8,000, you first need the set up from the 1964 game.
That was the first season Alter played a varsity schedule, although the school had no senior class. The Knights were a surprising 5-3 coming into the game with unbeaten Chaminade.
“I won’t forget that game,” Vari said. “No team before us had ever scored twice on them. We did.”
Then with a pause for effect, he laughed: “Yeah, it was real close …48-12! It was men against boys.
“But we’d had a pretty good year and that energized us to say, ‘We’ll see you guys next year!‘”
‘We’re No. 1!’
Stangle said when Rankin first came to Alter: “He was a Woody Hayes disciple and had played for Bear Bryant at Kentucky. He was a no-nonsense guy with a dry sense of humor.”
Vari called Rankin “a very stern, but fair man. Some of the guys didn’t care for him, but I really liked him. He ended up one of the top figures in my life.”
With a laugh he shared a sideline scene from the Knights’ game at Wayne his senior season:
“I’d caught six straight passes and then I got tackled on the cinders of their track and my kneecap was about torn off.
“The guy playing behind me comes up and says, ‘I’ll go in for Vari!’ and I remember Rankin hitting him in the head with his clipboard and saying: ‘You see his leg? It’s still attached. Sit down!’
“Right then I thought, ‘OK, he’s got faith in me, so I’ve got to have faith in him.‘”
As the 1965 finale with Chaminade approached, Alter was 7-2 and rated No. 2 in the Journal Herald’s much-followed area football rankings.
Chaminade was 8-1 and rated No. 1.
The day before the game, Alter students hired a plane to fly over Dayton pulling a banner that read: “Go Alter! – Beat Chaminade!” The muddy conditions didn’t deter Alter’s 5-foot-5, 167-pound fullback Bill Krull, who scored touchdowns in the second and third quarter. Fisher then went one yard for the Knights’ third score and Bill Priest added the last touchdown.
Alter – which outrushed Chaminade 315 yards to 18 that game – won 27-6.
As the final seconds drained off the clock, Alter students began a chant: “We’re No. 1!”
Once the Knights got back to the school, they threw Rankin in the showers and joyously held him there in what really was a watershed moment.
A good smile
Stangle and Vari were part of Alter’s first graduating class in 1966 and the two of them, along with five fellow seniors, went on to college football.
Priest joined Vari at Louisville; while John Vandenbosch, Harry Nielson and Mark Redrick went to UD with Stangle.
Fisher went to Xavier.
Stangle chose UD, not just because his older brother Tom was with the Flyers, but because he was impressed by head coach John McVay and his coaching staff, several of whom would go on to fame in the NFL and as college head coaches themselves.
Vari chose Louisville over Dayton because McVay had wanted him to live at home if he came to UD.
Both men said lessons they learned at Alter have served them well in life.
“We were taught to treat people like you want to be treated,” Vari said. “As I told the student body when I got inducted (in the Alter Hall of Fame): ‘I want you to look around at who’s next to you. Be nice to them. Shake their hand.’
“‘Some day that person may be using a dental drill in your mouth, and you don’t want them to go the wrong way for some reason from the past.‘”
Stangle has his own dentist story:
“That first year when we did tackling drills, we’d have two lines facing each other. One guy would come across as the tackler and the other guy – because we didn’t have tackling dummies – was the tacklee.
“Well, during those drills one day, the guy next to me lost his balance and stomped on my mouth.
“One of my front teeth was gone – I think I swallowed it – and the other one cracked.
“I came home and backed into the house, trying to hide it from my mom.
“Finally, she told me to turn around and as soon as she saw it, she said, ‘We’re going straight to the dentist!’ And he fixed my teeth.”
He gave Jim Stangle a good smile again.
One everyone got to see after that victory over Chaminade his senior season.
And one, in the decades that have followed, that has shown up on the faces of everyone connected to Alter football.
That, too, is part of The Legacy of Excellence.
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