A few months ago during basketball season, I was in Onaway’s gymnasium.
While there, I met fellow sports journalist Pete Jakey of Presque Isle Advance. We had the usual conversation about soccer, baseball, a little sports gambling, and the teams we were covering.
Then he made a comment about the coaches we both cover.
“Those kids would run through walls for him,” Jakey told me.
I agreed. Because I knew the M-68 kids would break down a wall for that coach.
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That coach is Onaway’s Eddie Szymoniak, a man who knows a thing or two about building competitive and successful programs.
As I scrolled through the countless social media posts discussing Simoniak on Tuesday night, I was disappointed to see what it was all about. Szymoniak, who accepted the difficult challenge of replacing the football coach who resigned before Onaway’s season opener last fall, will not coach next season.
Look, I’m not going to go into all the details of Onaway’s school board and some of the people who made these decisions and what those meetings were like. However, I think we missed an opportunity here.
This is your chance to go with someone who knows how to work with children.
It’s an opportunity to go with someone who motivates and develops kids in their respective sports.
An opportunity for someone to make those kids better people than they were before they started coaching them.
An opportunity for someone to make these kids winners on and off the field.
Additionally, Szymoniak would have given the football program something it needed in a big way: continuity.
Although Szymoniak didn’t come to the Onaway job with extensive soccer coaching experience, he was surrounded by staff who helped him along the way. And perhaps no coach I know is as adept at adapting as Szymoniak, who was not afraid to take on the task.
If anything, the lack of continuity is hurting the on-away footballers, who must be frustrated at having to start all over again. Of course, so do many others in the Onaway community who are equally frustrated by the seemingly unstable nature of the program.
Heck, maybe things will get better in the next coaching era, but I wish more of these athletes were playing for someone who cared about them and their chances of success as much as any other player. I know I want to keep going.
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Onaway senior linebacker Justin Kramer-St. , go, go, go, go, go,” Onaway senior linebacker Justin Kramer-St. Martin said. That’s what Jermaine told me a few days before the opening game of last season. The season opener started in Week 2 because the Cardinals had to forfeit Week 1 due to coaching uncertainty. “Anyone who knows Coach Eddie knows he’s 100 miles an hour no matter what.
“It’s because, honestly, he loves us as players and as people in general.”
Want proof that kids will run through walls for Simoniak? It’s right there in the pudding of his one of the best on-away footballers in recent years.
I don’t know what the future holds for on-away football, but I hope they do well for the sake of the program. But if you ask me, it would have been easy to go with Simoniak.
When Onaway ended his soccer campaign last October, it was on a rainy Thursday night at home. The Cardinals clinched the season championship with a win over a solid Cedarville team.
It would have been fun to see what Szymoniak could have done in his second year, but now we’ll never know.
Contact sports editor Jared Greenleaf.jgreenleaf@gannett.com.Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter@Sports CDT
