Jefferson County Large Schools Coach of the Year:
Scott Gerling, Northwest Lions
Runner-Up: A.J. Ofodile, Festus Tigers
Jefferson County Small Schools Coach of the Year:
Frank Ray, St. Pius Lancers
Runner-Up: Cory Hanger, Grandview Eagles
We should reconsider the convention of putting Large Schools award winners over top of Small Schools award winners. That goes double when it comes to coaches! Coaching at a small school in Missouri can be a thankless job, ten times more challenging than a gig on a gigantic campus with plenty of athletes to go around and ample resources. Coaches at smaller programs deal with issues Class 6’s can’t imagine.
Besides, the St. Pius Lancers’ head coach Frank Ray is an A-#1 choice with little debate following the Lancers’ big breakthrough to the 2025 state finals. St. Pius, as has been well-documented by now, was working against a history of futility when the Lancers defeated the #1 seeded Caruthersville Tigers to win district honors. Any head coach who had driven Hill Valley only that far would be in line for COTY. The Lancers’ phenomenal trek to the Show-Me Bowl put a stamp on it. Ray is a repeat COTY award winner.
The Geek has always admired Madonna’s tunes, though, and Madonna’s very best trick to becoming a world-famous singer was to release something controversial followed by something that everyone could agree on. The attention from the first thing built up the audience for the second thing. That’s how it might go for Mississippi Magazine today as readers see the top selection of Scott Gerling as a COTY, and rush onto the site to make fun of TGG or just tell him that he’s crazy. There’s no debating about whether Ray should get COTY, but today’s Large Schools award is going to get some flack. Many readers will just giggle at the choice of Gerling lifting the trophy over A.J. Ofodile. Heck, they’re laughing already!
Why Gerling over Ofodile? First of all, apply the same principle to JeffCo’s coaching ranks as we’ve had to apply to the Jefferson County Power Poll this season. There is more success in local pigskin than ever before, which makes it a crowded field at the top! Ofodile has pushed the Festus Tigers beyond all accomplishments of previous CEOs at Midmeadow Lane, making a pair of Final Four appearances and a state-title game appearance in a span of 13 amazing months. But consider that even with merely an honorable mention in 2025, Coach O now holds “gold and silver” medals in our COTY race, prevailing with a COTY title last season also, then repeating as an honoree with another QB.
Ofodile’s team wasn’t expected to reach Week 14 this season. Not even Coach O had any inkling that they would meet Class 4’s top dynasty in a home game on Thanksgiving weekend. But having seen the Tigers perform with QB Parker Perry at the helm, we knew that it was possible. Meanwhile, coaches from Northwest and St. Pius X have been busy doing the IM-possible in 2025. Giggles? If you had told someone back in August that Northwest and St. Pius X would win a combined 17 times, that the Varsity Lions would destroy Fox before beating Seckman in the playoffs, AND that the St. Pius Lancers were about to go 5-1 in the postseason to finish Class 2 runner-up, AND get promoted to Class 3 out of nowhere?! They might’ve said, “Nice joke. Did you make it up yourself, or hear it someplace?”
Gerling’s methods at Northwest can be questioned. The Gridiron Geek and many others have indeed questioned them. Gerling blew what should have been a critical victory last midseason with a crummy fourth-down call versus Parkway South, then he held a sophomore Cohenn Stark out of action until fans wanted to yank their hair out. Alumni were grousing that the NHS coaching staff was too old-fashioned, stuck in its ways, and unable to relate to today’s teenagers. Gerling’s team, like Ray’s, can garner a mega-ton of penalty flags at the worst times to do so. Northwest-CH’s Week 3 loss to Seckman, in hindsight, was a clinic in underachieving. It made us wonder if NHS would ever figure things out.
You know what can’t be questioned? Gerling’s results by Week 12 of this season. Northwest’s 8-3 finish is the Lions’ best record in forever, in fact the only reason reporters like TGG can’t tout the Lions as having posted their best record since the Reagan Administration is that MSHSAA records going back to 1980 are dicey. Yahoo Sports has far more resources than Mississippi Magazine or the Jefferson County Leader, yet this postseason’s Northwest Lions item on Yahoo Sports doesn’t give 8-3 a precise milestone, hinting instead that the Week 11 triumph over Seckman was Northwest’s first playoff victory in several decades. Jefferson County Leader editor Russell Korando writes that it was Northwest’s “first district win since 2010,” but that was in Missouri’s dumbest era of playoff football when “districts” started in Week 7. Northwest’s 14-7 defeat of Seckman is such a milestone, it’s broken the MSHSAA database!
By hook or crook, Cedar Hill is winning more and more games each year under Gerling. You can say that Stark has been carrying him, or that Northwest went from 1-9 to 8-3 in parallel to the QB reaching High School and earning the starting role. But a Class 6 quarterback doesn’t play defense much. It’s the Lions’ improving defense that gave Stark the opportunity to lead just two scoring drives and defeat the Seckman Jaguars. Gerling’s defensive game plans managed to deter a deluge of dangerous opponents, and he did it without an elite pass rush, or any one player snagging more than two INTs.
The Geek looks forward to seeing Northwest’s new schedule when it comes out. If Gerling can help make a Suburban League schedule colorful, fair, and interesting, he’ll get another COTY award just for that!
St. Pius X’s Frank Ray Shines as Sports Info Administrator, Not Just Coach
Mississippi Magazine’s helpful editors got onto The Geek for mentioning St. Pius X coaches, playbooks, and tactics in more than half of the Lancers’ articles as of September. It made it worse that Harrison Ray is such a prominent name at Hill Valley now, forcing the sportswriter to repeat “SPX head coach Frank Ray” each time the skipper’s name comes up again instead of just typing “Ray” such as you would for “Gerling.” The student-athletes needed praise for making history, so The Geek took care to knock that off later in the year. But if the head coach is hard to ignore on a week-to-week basis, it’s not because of his coaching alone. Ray has shone brightly in the “SID” chair to become an influential promoter of Missouri pigskin.
There’s not much to add to the football side of the St. Pius discussion by now. The STL media and the Jefferson County Leader have combined to do a marvelous job showcasing the Lancers’ stunning second-place finish in Class 2. Ray impressed in his postgame press conference in St. Joseph, putting more value on SPX making runs at the Final Four every season rather than on winning one championship game. (No team wants the St. Louis Rams’ trajectory.) He has also proven that St. Pius wouldn’t need a fictional hand-picked crew of freshmen to take over the squad in order to win district tournaments within three years of the new staff taking over. The Lancers swept through 2025’s bracket with much of the same lineup that went just 5-6 last campaign, and 95% the same roster that lost to Caruthersville in Week 1. It’s the same Lancers we know, but they’ve been born again as athletes.
Ray’s administrative work is a reason why St. Pius kids are so motivated. St. Pius distributes all available media out in public 100% free-of-charge, even gameday photos. Actual photos of JeffCo players in action can be hard to get because of all the penny pinching that goes on, contracts with photographers that hide almost everything they do even if the photos aren’t used. Hill Valley takes a million photos of every game and puts them all out for free, along with as much video, commentary, and motivational speech that Ray can squeeze onto the Lancers’ social media. When Ray’s SPX Lancers go on a road trip, their followers take the road trip with them. Click on a team like North County’s socials and you’ll be fortunate to find a single image of Noah Lashley without half of his body chopped off and weird red dots across his head, courtesy of contract photographers who’re worried about losing 50 cents. Surf to the St. Pius Facebook and you might see a video of Evan Eckrich ordering a steak in the Bootheel, or hear the kids bicker with the coach in his car on the way to St. Joe. No more obscurity! The players love that fans are getting to know them.
It’s not all just for fun. Because the Lancers are so easy to follow, that makes them easy to cheer for, too, and it makes more kids want to enroll, survive the academics, and play like crazy for the hottest sports program around. It would make a difference in public schools’ internal recruiting, i.e. getting the largest, fastest boys to try out for Friday Night Lights, if they followed the St. Pius X example. Festus R-6 most certainly has, putting out more media than ever before, including deluxe programs with a team diary, genuinely good photos of kids scoring TDs on Facebook, and so on. Coach Ofodile even tied his program’s social media to The Gridiron Geek’s page – (<3) – the largest brand ever to do so.
It’s no coincidence that the Festus Tigers and St. Pius Lancers are our two most well-publicized teams and two of our most well-motivated teams, full of kids who’re already working toward the 2026 season. Critically, they’ve stayed humble enough to win, also, which has to surprise all of the county’s head coaches who kept their team under wraps, fearing that attention would cause attitude problems.
Ray knows that dealing with attention and staying humble is part of an athlete’s skill set. They must learn how to deal with it anyway, so why not let them have an overdose from the start! The former DeSoto HC Chris Johnson, who banned his players from putting their highlights on HUDL, fielded many teams that were OK in the regular season but poor in the postseason. When the Dragons finally got the attention, they had no idea how to handle it! Who wants to have a secret football team anyway, when you can play for the public? Kids want to sacrifice for something real, not a play-dough project.
We wondered how Hill Valley would deal with attention when the Lancers made the Final Four. Lordy, they sure got a lot of it, from KSDK and elsewhere. Did the players develop swollen egos and butt heads in the locker room? Nope. They headbutted and elbow-dropped the Monroe City Panthers to reach Week 15, capping off the school’s greatest run of Friday Night Lights (and weekend afternoons) in its history.
Why only innovate with Xs and Os, when you can light a wick off the field too. Frank Ray is hard to ignore because everything about his team feels new, not just new for St. Pius but groundbreaking for the region overall. We’ll find out soon if Ray’s influence helps to remove those red dots from Noah Lashley’s head.
Mississppi Magazine’s 2025 All-Star Team selections are due this coming Tuesday 12/16.