Staff photo / Brian Yauger. South Range quarterback Billy Skripac lifts the state championship trophy Friday in Canton.

For the first time in the history of the Ohio High School Athletic Association football tournament, a pair of public schools from the Mahoning Valley have won state titles in the same year.

Early Friday afternoon, South Range claimed its first-ever title with a resounding 53-21 win over Ironton. By sunset, Canfield made history with a 35-14 victory over Bloom-Carroll.

It took 51 years, but the feat was finally accomplished not just by two area schools, but by a pair of Mahoning County schools separated by just 5.9 miles.

Surely, players, coaches and fans from South Range and Canfield have crossed paths countless times. Given the proximity of the two schools, it’s safe to assume there is a great deal of interaction between the two communities.

Ironically, the Canfield and South Range programs also crossed paths in a sense five years ago when both schools found themselves unexpectedly rerouting their futures — and fortunes.

It was the spring of 2017. Six schools belonging to the All-American Conference — of which Canfield was a member — opted to exit the league and form what is now the Northeast-8 Conference.

Canfield was not invited to the party.

In essence, the schools voted to squeeze Canfield from the mix. At least publicly, the general consensus was that Canfield — with a male enrollment at the time of 361 — was too large a school to follow the others into the NE-8.

Canfield was suddenly forced to tackle the unenviable task of putting together an independent football schedule.

Niles and Poland, with male enrollments at the time of 299 and 259 respectively, would be the two largest schools in the newly-formed NE-8.

At the same time, South Range was looking for a place to call home. Participating as an independent, South Range was simultaneously invited into a pair of conferences — the NE-8 and the AAC Blue Tier, which eventually evolved into the Mahoning Valley Athletic Conference Grey Tier.

South Range could have taken the safe route and joined the MVAC, where it would have been the big fish in the small pond. Instead, it chose the opposite. In 2017, South Range’s male enrollment was 188 – significantly lower than other member NE-8 schools.

At the time, then-South Range superintendent Dennis Dunham explained that, “So the consensus, and it was unanimous with the coaches, was we would be a Division V school playing up one division because all of them are Division IV with the exception of Niles. We felt we could be competitive in that league and we know we will have to play up and we felt by doing so we would better prepare ourselves for postseason tournaments.”

Mission accomplished!

Since the NE-8 began play in 2019, South Range owns an overall record of 45-6, including a 25-2 league record and a 13-3 playoff mark.

During the same span, Canfield is 41-7, including an 11-2 playoff record. Playing as an independent, opponents have included the likes of Louisville, Dover, West Branch, New Philadelphia, Chaney and Fitch.

You can now add “state champions” to both resumes.

By contrast, the other seven schools in the NE-8 own a combined 16-17 playoff record since 2019.

According to fantastic50.net, Canfield this year played the 14th strongest schedule among 106 Division III schools. South Range played the most difficult schedule among all 107 Division V schools.

It’s impossible to speculate just how different things may have turned out for Canfield had the AAC stayed intact. Or what the MVAC would have been like with South Range in the mix.

What is clear is that the dissolving of the AAC ultimately led both South Range and Canfield to “up their regular season game,” if you will. The results have been overwhelmingly favorable for both programs.

Five years ago, South Range and Canfield crossed paths as one school entered a league which the other was forced to exit.

On Friday, both teams followed the same path to Canton. They then both followed the same path back home to Mahoning County, each with a state championship trophy in hand.