Legendary Ellet High School football coach Joe Yost and each of his assistants wrote a letter to their players in the buildup to the 1989 City Series Thanksgiving Day Championship game against Buchtel.
“The letter I wrote to the boys, I said, ‘There will come a day when things aren’t going your way, and you’ll think back, and you’ll say it went my way on that day,’” Yost told the Beacon Journal in 2024.
Yost cherished Ellet’s 7-6 victory over Buchtel — he called it “the gem” of his coaching days. He even preserved as keepsakes the letters used to motivate the Orangemen. The messages provided a window into his coaching style.
“Sometimes we have opportunities for great things to happen, but they don’t just happen,” Yost said, describing the the theme of the letters. “You’ve got to be focused. You’ve got to be dedicated. You’ve got to focus on your assignments, and you just have to know in your heart it’s going to be you.”
The face of Ellet football for nearly four decades, Yost died on Thursday, Aug. 13, retired Akron Public Schools assistant athletic director Ron Linger and former longtime Ellet baseball coach John Sarver told the Beacon Journal. Yost was 73.
Yost went 234-152-2 in 38 seasons at the helm of Ellet. He retired from coaching in 2017 and holds the Akron Public Schools record for most career wins by a football coach. He also taught physical education and health, working for 36 years at Ellet and for three years at Hyre Middle School.
Sarver attended high school with Yost and later served as one of Yost’s football assistants for nearly 40 years. Sarver’s older brother, Tom, was one of Yost’s classmates at Ellet.
“Since I was a kid, he was a leader,” John Sarver, 72, said of Yost by phone. “Since I was a student at Ellet when he was president of student council and became a football coach and asked me to coach with him, he was such a leader of the community for Ellet. He would do so much more than people knew with Ellet because it wasn’t just coaching. It was reading names at the graduation, being a part of so many different things. But he was truly a inspiration to me since I was a kid.
“It was the kind of thing where we were kids, and he’d call my brother up and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go up to Ellet, play football. I’ll see you up there in a half hour.’ My brother would grab me and say, ‘Let’s go. We’re going to Ellet.’ I didn’t have any say-so. I was going up regardless, and it was Joe who inspired that.”
During Yost’s coaching tenure, Ellet won or shared eight City Series titles and made the Ohio High School Athletic Association playoffs three times (1991, 2012 and 2013). The Orangemen posted 23 winning seasons and finished with six .500 records.
“Joe is competitive and wanted to win. His players fought to win, but it was obvious he prioritized the sportsmanship of his players and the life lessons they learned through football as an even greater goal than winning,” former Tallmadge football coach and retired APS athletic director Joe Vassalotti told the Beacon Journal at the time of Yost’s retirement from coaching.
Yost and his wife, Patty, were married for nearly 38 years until she died in 2016.
A 1971 Ellet graduate, Yost played football and wrestled for the Orangemen. He served as an assistant football coach at Ellet and the University of Akron, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, before becoming the head coach of the Orangemen in 1979.
Yost was inducted into the Akron Public Schools Athletics Hall of Fame in 2024. At the induction banquet, former Garfield quarterback Marcus Sims, who helped the Golden Rams advance to a Division I regional championship game as a senior in 1989, approached Yost to pay him a compliment.
“If there was any other team I would have played for, it was you definitely because of your coaching scheme, your mentality and the structure you brought to the football game,” Sims told Yost. “I wanted to shake your hand.”
The moment perfectly illustrated the respect Yost earned throughout Northeast Ohio during his illustrious coaching career.
“Joe was easy to coach with. He was easy to get along with,” Sarver said. “He was a great leader for the kids — very stern, very strict, but it made me a better baseball coach. He definitely changed my life and made me a better baseball coach just because of his attitude toward kids and the little sayings that he had.
“He’d say, ‘Hey, listen, we need to have every man every day — every man every day here. You can’t take a day off just because you’re a little sore and stuff like that.’ I’d use the same line on the first day of baseball practice.”
Nate Ulrich is the sports columnist of the Akron Beacon Journal and a sports features writer. Nate can be reached at nulrich@thebeaconjournal.com. On Twitter: @ByNateUlrich.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron Ellet high school football coaching legend Joe Yost dies at 73
Reporting by Nate Ulrich, Akron Beacon Journal / Akron Beacon Journal
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By Nate Ulrich, Akron Beacon Journal | USA TODAY Network
