Staff Photos / Preston Byers. South Range’s Aidan Dominguez (left) carries the ball during a game against Springfield this season, while West Branch’s Boston Mulinix (right) runs a drill during a recent team practice.

Of the Mahoning Valley’s dozens of high school football teams, only two make the playoffs with a perfect record intact.

There’s South Range, which completed its annual sweep of the Northeast 8 Conference and largely dominated its non-conference opponents en route to a 10-0 regular season. This is the second time the Raiders have accomplished the feat in the last three years after finishing 2022 with a 16-0 record and, most importantly, a Division V state championship.

Sixteen farm-filled miles from the Rominger Athletic Complex lies the Mahoning Valley’s other undefeated team: West Branch.

The Warriors are no strangers to a perfect regular season either; They finished 10-0 in 2021 before falling to the Ursulines in the Division IV regional final. Like South Range, which has won more than 30 consecutive conference games, West Branch is also in the midst of a historic streak, having won 10 or more games in each of the last four years.

The similarities between the two programs are evident to both coaches.

“I think our kids in our communities are similar in the sense that we are rural communities with agricultural backgrounds and a little more hard-working, blue-collar type kids than other places,” the West Branch head coach said. Tim Cooper said.

David Rach, South Range’s second-year coach, said much the same thing, adding that both schools’ communities are invested in athletics and have fostered “fun” atmospheres for their players.

“You can watch a team and tell when they’re having fun playing,” Rach said. “When you look at West Branch and South Range, it’s evident that those kids have fun competing and play freely and with confidence. “I think it’s kind of a staple of Coach Cooper’s program and hopefully it’s a staple of ours.”

Coincidentally, both men became head coaches after an undefeated regular season. For Cooper, he earned a promotion from offensive coordinator to head coach after orchestrating the Warriors’ high-powered offense during 2021, West Branch’s best season since 1998.

Rach, a South Range alumnus, returned to high school after graduating from Youngstown State and rose to be the Raiders’ defensive coordinator, a position he remained in during the program’s first state football championship. After the magical 2022 season, Rach replaced longtime coach Dan Yeagley.

In both cases, the new, young coaches have kept the ball rolling, so to speak.

As a first-year head coach last season, Rach led the Raiders to a 9-1 regular season and the regional final before being defeated by eventual state champion Perry. In his first season as head coach in 2022, Cooper achieved the exact same result, except Jefferson Area, not Perry, ended the Warriors’ season in the regional final.

While West Branch fell in the regional semifinal to Canton South a year ago, Cooper and his team entered the 2024 season with sky-high expectations but the same three goals.

“We want to win the EBC (Eastern Buckeye Conference). We want to beat our rivals. And we want to play our best football at the end of the year,” Cooper said. “So regardless of what week it is, we want to continue to improve.”

Like Cooper, Rach would like to make it to ‘Week 16’ and compete for a state title, but the South Range coach learned firsthand from Yeagley that each week is just as important as the next.

“(Yeagley) did a great job making sure we really prepared the same way, week in and week out, for whoever we were playing,” Rach said. “I think it’s still kind of a staple of the show. I think our guys really embrace treating every game like we’re in a championship game.

“I think it’s a skill in itself. It’s very difficult to change and flip a switch and suddenly prepare like it’s a championship game if you’re not used to doing it every week.”

Judging by the score at the end of each Friday night for the past two months, both West Branch and South Range approached the regular season the right way.

The Raiders won their 10 games by an average margin of victory of 29.2 points, while the Warriors won by 36.4 points on average.

However, neither coach said they had it “easy” with their schedule.

“For me, we’ve been in 10 really tough games,” Rach said. “We’ve been in some situations that are really difficult. At the end of the half, with Struthers, we were down 14-0… A lot of these teams made it very difficult for us, they had us on the ropes.”

West Branch’s biggest scare came last week against rival Salem, which took a 7-6 halftime lead against the Warriors despite winning just three of its nine games previously.

“I take my hat off to Coach (Ron) Johnson and his game plan. They had a fantastic game plan,” Cooper said. “They slowed down the game. They limited our offensive possessions. “We had three offensive possessions in the first half.”

While the Warriors managed to outscore the Quakers 20-0 in the second half to complete their undefeated regular season, it served as another reminder (not that Cooper needed it) to never overlook an opponent.

That lesson will prove even more vital now in the playoffs, where a loss will not only sting, but will also last nine months until the next season begins.

Both coaches hope experience, of which West Branch and South Range have plenty, will be a big factor in their success over the next six weeks.

“Any time you have a program that’s been to the postseason and championship games, they probably have some type of advantage just in terms of the experience that you know we have,” Rach said. “We have senior players right now who have played, I think, 54 games in their career. Considering there are many seniors at Ohio State who have only played 40, we have juniors who have already played 40+ games. So those extra weeks of preparation are huge.”

The Warriors are fortunate in that way, as well as another.

In addition to postseason football experience (West Branch has played more than a dozen postseason games over the past three seasons), some members of the team have already captured a state title this year.

The Warriors baseball team defeated Division II power Hamilton Badin to win the first state championship in program history in June, an accomplishment that Cooper and some of the championship-winning football players are confident will help them. in November and, they hope, in December.

“It kind of opened the door to say we can really do things here at West Branch, great things here at West Branch,” junior quarterback Jeremiah Thomas said.

Boston Mulinix, who scored the title-winning run in the state final nearly five months ago, knows the baseball team didn’t win a championship looking ahead, and neither will the football team.

“Ultimately, your goal every year is to win the last game,” Mulinix said. “But we’re going to take it week by week and try to win this week and see what happens after that.”

First up against West Branch is Hubbard, one of South Range’s NE-8 rivals that lost to the Raiders 38-0 in their regular season finale.

The Raiders will also face a familiar foe: Navarre Fairless will travel to Beaver Township for the second straight year. South Range defeated the Falcons 43-20 in the first round of the playoffs last season.

And while they’ll be busy with their own games this weekend, Rach and Cooper, who worked on the same coaching staff earlier this year during the Penn-Ohio All-Star Game and whose teams played in the preseason, will look forward to each other . continued success.

“(West Branch) is obviously one of those programs that you know is going to be in the hunt every year…and they’re doing a great job,” Rach said. “Obviously we’re rooting for them during the playoffs.”