Tom Archdeacon: Veteran coach finds his place at Ponitz

Aug. 28--HUBER HEIGHTS -- All of a sudden he wished he had used invisible ink.

"I have these tattoos on my arm and I was kind of nervous about the first impression he was going to get," Jawuan Angelo Reece was saying as he stood on the edge of the football practice field at Ponitz Career Tech the other day and recalled the first time he met the Golden Panthers' new head football coach, Jim Place.

As he spoke, the senior running back ran a hand over his left forearm, which was covered by his mother's name "Michenda" in script and the Chinese symbols for the word "mother."

His right arm bore a cross, the letter H, a tombstone and the phrase "In love and memory."

"This honors my cousin -- he was known as H and was shot a couple years ago," he said of Willie Henry Boddie, shot three times while sitting in a Dodge Charger at a car wash on W. Riverview Ave.

"This is about family," Reece said. "I'm a good kid really, but I was afraid Coach wouldn't see it."

He started to smile:

"I was wrong. He came over to welcome me and let me know he was glad I was here. Coach and his staff greeted everybody like that and that's when we all knew something special was going on here."

Reece is right.

Something special is happening with the Golden Panthers, who open their season tonight in Cincinnati against Clark Montessori High.

Place, the veteran Hall of Fame coach who has returned from a brief retirement, has taken over one of the Miami Valley's most moribund programs the past few years in hopes of removing the tombstone from it.

Ponitiz has had football for six previous seasons and in that time there have been four other head coaches and 10 victories against 50 defeats. The Panthers ended last season with about 20 players in uniform for a 76-0 drubbing by Thurgood Marshall.

In his 47-year career, Place -- who starred at the University of Dayton in the late 1960s -- has coached at eight previous schools: Alter, Northwestern, Stebbins, Beavercreek, Chaminade Julienne, Middletown, Hamilton and Cincinnati Withrow.

Last year, for the second season in his career, he did not coach and seemed to be easing toward retirement. He's 68 now and he and wife Joanie have five grandchildren. He teaches a popular grad school class for teachers at UD and has done everything imaginable as a prep coach from reviving programs to winning a state title (the Division II crown with CJ in 2002) and sending hundreds of kids onto college with scholarships.

And yet last fall he said every "Thursday, Friday and Saturday night I went and watched football. I just sat there ... and it killed me. I realized I can do without football, but not without being a coach.

"To me there's something magical in that word. When you are a coach, you have a special opportunity to impact young people's lives in a positive way."

"As I get to the end of my career now, I want to be going to where there is the greatest need. I know it sounds Pollyanish, but it's time for me to give back."

Early this year he said he ran into Jackie Fails, the longtime City League coach who told him Ponitz was having trouble finding a veteran coach.

"They had had some good coaches, but they needed a good program," Place said.

He said he would coach for free, so the young coaches on the staff could get the money while he mentored them to take over t.

To help him do that, he added five veteran coaches as assistants. All had contacted him and offered to work for free.

And they all had head-turning credentials:

Bob Palcic has coached college and pro football for 37 years with stops at Ohio State, Wisconsin, USC, UCLA, SMU, the Cleveland Browns, New Orleans Saints, Atlanta Falcons and the Detroit Lions among others.

Mike Wilson, the "team mentor" Place called him, is a UD Hall of Famer who played 14 years as a pro including NFL stints with Cincinnati, Kansas City and Buffalo.

Jim Siewe was a head coach at Alter and Wayne, Joe Russo was head coach at Patterson, Colonel White and Belmont and Mike McCall worked at Alter.

"Once one of the young guys is ready to take over, I'm done," Place said. "But I want them to understand the difference in being a guy who just teaches football and being a coach.

"You're here to impact kids. To me, a coach sees the best in kids and then uses football to bring it out of them."

'All kids are good'

"Ponitz is the perfect place for me," Place said. "It's everything I wanted and I love the kids to death.

"Over the years I've coached at suburban, parochial, rural and inner-city schools and no matter where you go, kids are kids. They all want the same things. They want to be happy and successful.

"The thing with urban kids is that they just have so much more to overcome to get there. And too often those with the greatest need have the least resources."

He noted that while kids grades seven to 12 in Beavercreek, Kettering and Centerville all are bused to school, their counterparts in the Dayton Public School system have to find their own transportation.

To combat some of that, Place found a half-dozen donors who got every kid on the team a 30-day bus pass so they could make two-a-day practices.

He also has stocked two new weight rooms with donated equipment.

When he took over at Ponitz, Place called Ron Hemelgarn, the 1965 CJ grad who is now a Toledo-based health club and fitness entrepreneur and a former Indy Racing League team owner who won the Indy 500.

"It was the shortest phone call I ever had," Place said. "He said, 'You want a gym full of equipment?' I said 'yep' and he sent it.

"I wish you could have seen the kids' faces the first time they saw it. They love it."

Reece agreed: "All this has been a blessing. It's something you didn't even dream asking for because you're scared it would be a 'No.'

"But he keeps giving it to us and we accept it and we're going to repay him."

Place said it's all about "changing a culture" and getting kids to believe in the program and in themselves.

"He came in and changed everything and people do believe," said junior linebacker DeMarco Long. "He's like a role model for me now."

Place started the process at the first team meeting when he had the players pretend they had a big book in their laps:

"I told them to open the book and that every page in it was blank. I said, 'I don't care about your past. I don't care if your mom is the president of the school board or she's in jail. With me you all have a blank book, so start writing in it.'"

While he pushes them to "stay positive," he said he begins with the belief that "all kids are good."

To help with the process, he gave each player a small "character card" that lists 10 keys to attitude and 10 positives for being part of the program.

"Those are the rules of our program," junior right tackle Kaileb Kinkead said. "I carry mine in my wallet."

Freedom to dream

The Ponitz practice field is an oasis tucked under highway overpasses on the edge of downtown Dayton. A train trestle frames another side of the field. Out front, big, over-loaded trucks rumble along Washington Street to the salvage yards just across the Great Miami River.

The biggest salvage job, though, is the one Place and his assistants are attempting.

Where there were 20 kids last November there are now more than six dozen practicing.

"Everyone has come out for the team this year because these coaches are an inspiration," Kinkead said.

But as he looked out on the field where Place, his hair white, his football-ravaged left knee encased in a bulky brace, hobbled from drill to drill urging players on, he quietly admitted he hadn't heard of the coach before he came to Ponitz:

"Then I saw his Hall of Fame plaque at Welcome Stadium and I started to find out more. He won state and did all these other things. I realize now it's really an honor to play for him and one day I'll be able to tell my kids I played for a Hall of Fame coach. I played for Coach Place."

Reece said Place is unlike any other coach he has had:

"A lot I had in the past I only knew them as coaches. But he lets us know who he is as a man and a person. And he helps us with what lies outside of football. He's letting us know our future isn't the same old one you see for a lot of guys who end up on the streets after they played.

"He's letting us know we can go on from here, that our dreams can be bigger than we thought."

First, though, comes this season, and while the schedule starts out tough for Ponitz, Place said, "We're going to win a lot of games here. We have kids who can play."

And while the players all agreed, that positive thinking has presented a real dilemma for Reece:

"I wanted to play basketball this year, but if we get to the playoffs I don't know how that'd work. I wouldn't be done in time with my football."

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