Flyer makes coaching history
Before Paul Brown won a national championship at Ohio State and founded a couple of successful pro football teams, he coached at Massillon (Ohio) High School. In nine seasons there, he won five state championships and four national championships. He set a record for career wins that would last more than 80 years.
Nate Moore ’03 surpassed that in 2022.
In 2023, the Massillon Washington Tigers won their first state championship in 53 years.
Moore was named MaxPreps National Coach of the Year.
It started with a cold call. Moore didn’t know Jim Place ’69. But he knew of him. Place had just guided Dayton’s Chaminade Julienne to Ohio’s Division II championship at Massillon Paul Brown Tiger Stadium. Armed only with the knowledge that Place was an outstanding coach and a fellow Flyer, Moore called him.
Moore’s message was simple: “I want to coach football. I don’t need to get paid.”
Before his UD senior year, Moore hadn’t thought much about a career in coaching.
“I was planning on going into education,” he said. “But I was cleaning out my locker at the end of the season, and I realized that I didn’t want football to be done.”
He had come late to playing football and even later to success. He didn’t start playing until seventh grade. “The first year I played much was as a 6-foot-1, 165-pound sophomore on JV. I wasn’t on varsity until senior year.”
By then he had grown to 6-feet-4-inches, 250 pounds. But scholarship offers did not come his way. He did, however, get a call from Rick Chamberlin ’78, one of head coach Mike Kelly’s coordinators at Dayton. So, Moore became a Flyer. Freshman year he was one of four offensive tackles splitting playing time. Five years later (one redshirting with an ACL injury), he was an all-American with a college degree looking to be a coach.
Place hired him to be assistant line coach at CJ. “I knew nothing about coaching,” Moore said. “I was fascinated with how Place ran the program. He was both loved and respected by the players. That’s a hard thing to balance. He cared about them, but he also held them accountable.”
After Place moved on to Hamilton (Ohio) High School, Moore followed him. When Place retired, Moore knew he didn’t have enough experience to succeed him but did apply for head coaching jobs at smaller schools. He was offered a job at Minster (Ohio) High School. The football team had finished the previous year 1-9. “And I wasn’t even their first choice,” he said.
Living in Minster, he said, “was like living in Mayberry. It was the kind of place where people left their keys in their parked cars. (Cars had keys then.)”
Entering the new job, Moore said,
“I was subconsciously a mini-Jim Place, applying what I learned from him and at UD. Over time, I put together my own system, but I still rely on Jim Place and UD.”
He must have learned something about relationships. When he arrived in the spring, he went to each player’s home to visit the player and his parents. Minster plays in the Midwest Athletic Conference, which is composed of high schools in towns in that area north of Dayton fondly called God’s Country. To Moore, those friendly communities are similar; each has a Catholic church, a high school and a small downtown. Between them lies fertile Ohio farmland.
But there was a difference between Minster and the other towns. For some time, Minster’s football team had not been as good as theirs. So, Moore asked why. “There were excuses,” he said. “‘We’re small.’ ‘We don’t have this.’ ‘We don’t have that.’”
He understood that people wanted to protect their children’s feelings. “But that’s not OK if you want to be good,” he said. “So, we were not going to tolerate excuses.”
The team went out that fall and lost its first four games. They played well at times. In the fourth game, however, they lost to Marion Local 41-6. At one point in the game, when a Minster player got a cramp and Moore came out to attend to him, he glanced up at players on the other team standing nearby.
“I expected to see giants,” he said. “But they looked the same as our guys.”
“Our guys” won their next five. Winning the 10th would secure a play-off spot; they lost. But after the game, news came to the locker room that another team had lost letting them slip in. “In the playoffs we beat Springfield Local and then had a rematch with Marion Local,” Moore said. “It was a night for the ages. One could coach for years and not have a moment like that.” Minster 30, Marion Local 26.
Moore’s second stop on his way to Massillon was in a bigger city at a school in a higher division, Cincinnati La Salle. “I was second choice there, too,” Moore said.
The first year started well, but the team ended 3-7. The problems he encountered were different from those in Minster. “There was not an emphasis on the weight room nor on discipline and an overemphasis on star power.” The issues were addressed in the off-season.
In the second year, Moore said, “We caught some magic” — a 14-1 record and a Division II state championship. The game at Ohio Stadium on Ohio State's campus immediately before was the Division VI state championship game — won by Minister.
“At the end of January,” Moore said, “I got a call from the coach at Ashland University. I thought he was calling about a player.
But he, a former Massillon head coach, was asking if I’d be interested in the Massillon job.”
That spring Moore was in Massillon, “a great town,” he said. The issues were similar to those at La Salle — lack of emphasis on the weight room and accountability and an overemphasis on individual things. They were addressed. And Massillon in 2023 had its first state championship in 53 years.
For those who might note it was a Division II championship and 53 years ago there were no divisions, Massillon during the season did play the eventual Division I champion, St. Edward. Massillon 15, St. Edward 13.
Moore keeps in touch with his past such as families in Minster; he remembers his former players; and he recalls what he learned from Place — there’s more to football than piling up victories.
“Jim Place cared about being a good team,” Moore said, “but also about developing players as men. He purposefully used sport to teach lessons about growing up.” And of his players, Moore said,
“They have made me a much better father than I might have been.”
Those lessons will be useful this fall to Moore as a coach and a father. His son Eli is a student and a quarterback at Massillon High School.
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A version of this article appears in print in the Summer 2025 University of Dayton Magazine, Page 24. EXPLORE THE ISSUE — MORE ONLINE