Heading into the 2025 season, the Rootstown Rovers are ready for a new challenge in the Chagrin Valley Conference.
The Rovers, who previously competed in the Portage Trail Conference, joined the CVC last fall.
“It’s a great conference and has a lot of history to it, and it has some really tough competition,” said Rootstown second-year football coach Tom Hannan. “We’re looking forward to it. It’s going to be new in terms of facing teams we haven’t seen before, but that makes it exciting.”
Hannan, who is in his 44th year of coaching and 29th as a head coach, took over the Rootstown program last fall after Chris Knopick resigned after three seasons. Hannan previously served as the head coach at Crestwood, where he won 92 games, the most in school history. He also served as the head coach at Ridgedale and Lakewood and as an assistant at Garrettsville Garfield and Kent Roosevelt.
Last fall, the young Rovers completed the regular season with a 4-6 record and then dropped a playoff game to Kirtland, a team they’ll see in Week 10 this year.
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“What people didn’t realize is last season, we only had four seniors and everybody else was a first-year varsity player,” Hannan said. “We lost two close games to Pymatuning Valley and Warren JFK, or we could have turned that 4-6 around to 6-4, but that didn’t happen, but we were close.”
Despite the 4-6 record, Rootstown qualified for the postseason for the eighth consecutive year.
“Our reward was facing Kirtland,” Hannan said. “I told the kids, it’s another week of football, and it’s an honor to make the playoffs. For us, it was good to see Kirtland because we’re going to have to play them now Week 10 in our league every year, so it was a good experience to go up against them.”
Hannan wasn’t hired until April of 2024, so the Rovers were behind the sticks from the start.
With a full offseason, Hannan is optimistic about the 2025 campaign.
“We’ve had a great offseason,” he said. “Our kids have gotten a lot bigger, a lot stronger, and that’s due a lot to my new strength coach that I hired, Lucas Kimball. He’s also my defensive coordinator.”
Rootstown enters the 2025 season with eight returning starters on offense and seven on defense.
“With our offseason and experience, I’m looking for a better record than 4-7,” Hannan said.
Hannan also added a new offensive coordinator in Alan Vanderink, who starred for Hannan at Crestwood before a career at Kent State University. Vanderink is familiar with the CVC as he was the head coach at Berkshire in 2012, and he also served as head coach at Tallmadge and Kent Roosevelt.
Hannan and Vanderink are staying true to their roots, running a Wing-T offense with a couple of twists.
“We’re still going to be a run-oriented offense,” Hannan said. “Rootstown has always had big, strong, tough kids, and we’ve always had a good runner. We have our tailback coming back, and like I said, we have eight starters coming back on offense. We have our quarterback back, he’ll be a junior and started all 11 games for us as a sophomore last year, and we have four of our linemen back, so we’re just looking for bigger and better things. We’re bigger, we’re stronger, and we have a year of experience, so hopefully that pays off.”
Rootstown opens the 2025 season at home against Toledo Christian on Aug. 22.
