Ironton Coach Bob Lutz (Part 1)

I've been asked several times how much do I know of Coach Lutz. Honestly I really don't know much but what I do know would fill several pages. A friend once said I bet you could write a book about him. Well we went to the same high school, attended the same church until he moved to Florida, lived in the same neighborhood, yes I coached his kids in Little League, and also watched his kids while he and his wife worked so you might say I have been around him a little.

Let's start when I was a Junior in high school at Saint Joseph. I was a member of the basketball team and Bob was our ball boy. He always liked to remind me of a game we played at Fairland. It just so happened that we had three starters out for this game for one reason or another. So it was to be expected that we were in for a tough game. The game was played at Fairland and as you might guess they were pouring it on our depleted team.

If I remember right, the Dragons had us by a score of 98 to 18 with about 2 minutes to go in the game. The other guard and I decided that we were not going to let them score another basket to get to 100. So we sat on the ball the last 2 minutes as the clock ran out.

Needless to say, we were very soundly booed by the home crowd but we did what we wanted as the score ended 98 to 18. Even to this day Coach Lutz likes to reminds me of this game.

I watched Bob play football when he went to Saint Joseph. Coach ran mostly the T formation when he coached but in high school he did something I had never seen before. One night at The Tank he ran what we called then the spread. It was some form of the shotgun.

First time I ever saw this formation.

Bob took over for Pat Sheridan at Saint Joseph when Pat moved up to Ironton High School. Pat had just won the OVC championship the year before and watching Bob's team practice at Clouston Field we didn't think he could win many games due to the losses through graduation. He really fooled us all by winning the OVC that year even when he lost all his OOC games. We knew then he had what it took to be a very good coach.