Year of the Quarterback: Stark County football star delivered Ivy League team's only 10-win season

EDITOR'S NOTE: Months of research led to a series, " Year of the Quarterback ," being presented in three waves. The first wave — 10 articles covering the volatile new world of the transfer portal — was published recently. This is the fifth story in the second wave, which t r acks then-and-now journeys of 10 Stark County quarterbacks.

A rule of thumb for quarterbacks : It's way harder to find the field in college than it is in high school.

It worked backwards for a lefty from Louisville, Ohio. This persistent fellow didn't get his hands on the football in high school until his senior year. By the time he neared the finish of his collegiate marathon, the Boston Globe was groping for poetry.

"In the mist and muck and gathering gloom of Memorial Field, Dartmouth quarterback Jon Aljancic took control of his team's destiny," began a Globe piece published Nov. 10, 1996.

It was a Brainiac Bowl, an Ivy League fight between unbeaten Dartmouth and a Columbia team that had humbled Harvard and Yale. It was no contest. Aljancic took Columbia to school in a 40-0 win.

While Aljancic didn't matriculate to the NFL, he drew a plaudit from someone who did.

"That quarterback is a good passer who can run," Columbia defensive star Marcellus Wiley told the Globe. "The combination provided a different element."

Whereas Wiley embarked on a 10-year run through the NFL, Aljancic's next step was more reflective of student-athletes who play to crowds of 7,000.

He made second-team All-Ivy League on a team that went 10-0 and then found his way to the Aix En Provence Argonautes of the French Federation of American Football.

"Each country over there has its own pro football league," Aljancic said. "All the league champions from each country qualify for the EuroBowl, which is a single-elimination playoff system to crown a champion for the continent.

"We actually won our league championship, but I didn’t play in the EuroBowl because the playoffs came at the beginning of the following season. By then, I was working in Chicago and newly married.

"I had some tryouts with some arena league teams the following year, but nothing panned out, and probably for the best. It was a new season of life."

Jon was one of four Aljancic siblings whose dad, Andy, was a town icon . The elder Aljancic was a teacher, a coach, a school board member and the director of the Louisville Recreation Department for 20 years.

"My father was the greatest man I’m going to meet on this side of eternity," Jon said — Andy was 63 when he died in 2005.

Jon's senior year at Louisville High School was one for the books.

He played quarterback on a team that made it to the state semifinals with a 12-0 record. He starred on a basketball team that was 23-1 before a tournament loss to Cleveland Villa Angela-St. Joseph. He made All-Ohio in baseball (his dad played on Kent State's first Mid-American Conference championship team, in 1964, before a stint in the Minnesota Twins organization).

"Jon was the real deal," said Rick Crislip, who was Aljancic's head football coach then and sits on the Louisville Board of Education with him now.

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Aljancic sat as a Dartmouth freshman but mostly started from then on. At Louisville, he wasn't the No. 1 quarterback until 12th grade.

"We had a guy ahead of him, Robby Arnold, who was a year older and had some great experience," Crislip said. "So, Jon was a starting defensive back for two years.

"Those two battled it out at quarterback when Jon was a junior. Either could have stepped in. We felt with Robby's experience, he won the position. Jon was a junior. Robby was a senior who did a fantastic job for us.

"As you look back, maybe it should have been Jon."

Aljancic recalls being passed over until senior year as "frustrating individually."

"What cushioned the blow was we were a very strong team, sharing the NBC crown and making the playoffs for the first time in school history my junior year," he said. "Rob was a three-year starter who was a tremendous competitor.

"Though I didn’t agree with Coach Crislip on who should start, Rob did a great job.  He was also my best friend growing up and still is, so I guess the Lord knew what he was doing."

"End of the Road," by Boyz to Men, topped the pop charts as the 1992 season approached. An opening 14-7 win over North Canton Hoover was a catchy beginning.

Louisville trailed 7-0 and faced fourth-and-5 inside the 10. Aljancic stepped through a rush and was falling as he threw to Brian Beatty for a touchdown. Then, Aljancic intercepted Tim Sturznickel and ran 47 yards to set up a go-ahead touchdown by Chris Menegay.

The next seven games were blowout wins over Ravenna, Salem, Marlington, Carrollton, Canton South, Dover and Northwest, setting up a battle of state-ranked Division II powers, No. 2 West Branch at No. 3 Louisville.

"A Few Good Men," co-starring 30-year-old Tom Cruise, wouldn't come out for a few more weeks, but it was showtime for Louisville in front of an overflow crowd.

Aljancic had a top-gun Friday on the ground and in the air, on a team that played its best game.

His 53-yard TD pass over the middle to Bob Burick brought down the house. He seemed to know exactly when to run, winding up with 88 yards. He even kicked a 35-yard field goal to make it 31-0 just before the band show.

The beat went on. The Leopards were 12-0 before falling to Fostoria in the state semifinals.

It was a time of transition.

Louisville had been a feared Federal League team under Coach Paul Starkey, going undefeated in league play as recently as 1981, but the era leaked into hard times, and from 1986-89 the Leopards went 9-31.

The school relocated to the Northeastern Buckeyes Conference in 1990, when Aljancic was a sophomore starting at defensive back on a 7-3 team.

He stayed on defense as a junior in 1991, with Arnold quarterbacking a team that was 9-1 before a playoff loss to Lake, which eventually fell to Fostoria in the state finals.

Even when he did play quarterback as a senior, Aljancic wasn't the most decorated player on his own team. That was Beatty, a running back who won a Division I scholarship to the University of Louisville, a rising program that came close to knocking off Ohio State in a 1992 season opener.

"Jon wasn't getting hit hard by Division I," Crislip said. "That floored me because he had the size, and he had the temperament.

"When the Ivy League came calling, he was all about that."

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Dartmouth is in Hanover, New Hampshire, a long drive from Stark County and a two-hour trip to Harvard.

Ivy League football is ... different. In 2024, league members didn't open their seasons until Sept. 21, three weeks after major-college teams kicked off.

The league has produced some well-known NFL players, including Pro Football Hall of Famer Chuck Bednarik (Penn), former Browns running back Calvin Hill (Yale), Bengals Ring of Honor linebacker Reggie Williams (Dartmouth), and bearded quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick (Havard).

Massillon native Mike Brown owner of the Cincinnati Bengals , was Dartmouth's starting QB in 1956.

Undrafted Dartmouth star Jay Fielder put up a 21-10 record in his first two years as the Miami Dolphins starter who replaced Dan Marino .

Fiedler was a Dartmouth senior when Aljancic was a freshman.

"I realized I had a really good guy in front of me, Jay, and I wanted to learn as much as I could from him for that one year," Aljancic recalls. "I knew there was a guy I would battle who was coming back the next year.

"Then a transfer came in from Colorado State. Now I'm in a three-way battle. I didn't anticipate that. The other guy I was going against had been recruited by the offensive coordinator.

"It was a rough road for a little bit."

With Fiedler gone, the Big Green had an odd 4-6 year in which the sophomore, Aljancic, passed for 590 yards amidst a time share with Jerry Singleton (620) and Ren Riley (495).

As a junior, Aljancic was the quarterback who played the most. He completed just 40% of his passes, but he made plays with his feet, running for nine touchdowns on a team that went 7-2-1, along the lines of the 7-3 from Fiedler's last year.

Thinking to those times, Aljancic said, "College athletics are hard. The grind in the months when there are no games is hard. For those who can embrace that, game days become well worth it."

The stars aligned in his senior season. The opener was a thriller, a 24-22 win over Penn. A 6-3 win at Harvard was a slog. A 40-6 rout of Yale, witnessed by a season-best home crowd of 10,119, stood out.

For the year, Aljancic passed for 10 touchdowns and ran for 10 on a 10-0 team. He completed 60% of his throws.

It stands as the only 10-win season in Dartmouth history.

“Jon was a tremendous competitor who worked really hard to improve,” then-Dartmouth head coach John Lyons told the Repository last week. “His junior year there were things we felt he needed to work on.

“We were running a lot of similar stuff with Jon that we ran with Jay.

“He may not have agreed on certain things we were saying, but he took it to heart and worked on ‘em. It really paid off for him.

“The players responded to him. He had a great year on a team that was really good.”

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None of Dartmouth's games was closer than an eight-hour drive to Louisville.

"We didn't have a lot of money, but my parents were wonderful," Aljancic said. "My mother (Joan) never missed any of my starts, My father missed one.

"A lot of those weekends for them was watching my little brother (Mike) play at Louisville, hopping in a car, and driving 12 hours to get to a noon kickoff.

"That meant a lot. They modeled unselfishness and the importance of family."

Aljancic was a serious student at Louisville. So it was at college.

"I played football and baseball at Dartmouth," he said. "I didn't have time to screw around, quite frankly.

"When you're a high school kid and had success, you just anticipate your success translating into college, and that may not be the case.

"All of a sudden everybody is talented. What you really encounter is … how much do you love the game?

"It's a job. You're putting a lot of time in. How hard are you willing to work?

"Those guys who love the game and put the work in day in day out are the guys who will succeed."

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Aljancic entered the world of finance, eventually establishing himself with Chicago-based WH Trading. The youngest of his three sons, Tate, was in second grade when the family moved to Louisville.

“Chicago was awesome,” Tate said. “I was pretty young, but I enjoyed things like going to Cubs games.

“I was a little nervous when we moved, but I was excited, too … my grandparents live here.

“We lived in Valparaiso for a while. The high school there is huge, bigger than Jackson in Stark County.

“Football is so much different here. There’s a lot more passion. My dad took us to games at Louisville and a lot of other places.

“He doesn’t really talk about himself, but people we would see at the games did, so I kind of picked up what kind of player he was that way."

Jon brought Chicago with him, opening an office in Louisville as a partner/position manager for WH Trading.

"I was on the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade for a lot of years," he said. "It was like a football field inside a casino, very physical and high-paced. I’m still at it. It’s not quite as fun doing it on a screen as it was doing it in the trading pit."

Courtny Aljancic, Jon's wife, was Courtny Testa when she attended Lake High School, where she was Stark County Player of the Year in volleyball in 1992.

All three sons are athletes. Ryan plays baseball for Union University, in Jackson, Tennessee. Will started as a freshman at Findlay in the 2023-24 college basketball season after a record-setting career at Louisville. Tate is in his senior year as a three-sport athlete at Louisville.

Like his dad, Tate felt ready to start at quarterback as a junior but wasn't the starter until his senior year. Father told son to hang in there.

"He said there’s a plan for me," Tate said. "He said it motivated him when he went through it. At the end of the day you have to focus on what you can control."

The Leopards have struggled through recent seasons of playing as an independent.

"We’re trying to build a culture here to bring back Louisville football," Tate said.

Jon Aljancic played at about 6-foot-1. Tate is a few inches taller.

"Tate really could play at the next level in any of his sports," head football coach Chris Kappas said. "I don’t know if football is his top sport, but he certainly knows the game and prepares like it is, as much as anybody I've seen. He’s a really great leader and wants to win."

Jon Aljancic missed Stark County sports when he lived elsewhere. He enjoys following the local teams and players now. He watches quarterbacks with a studied eye, including, of course, his son.

He is curious to see how record-setting Canton South QB Jack "Poochie" Snyder fares in college.

Snyder signed with Sacred Heart, an NCAA Division I BCS program in Connecticut, 25 miles from Ivy League member Yale. The Ivy League competes in the same NCAA division as Sacred Heart.

Aljancic got involved in trying to get Snyder and Dartmouth together.

"I really think he would be a good fit in the Ivy League," Aljancic said. "I saw him face Louisville in a seven-on-seven. I thought, my goodness, this kid is throwing dimes everywhere.

"Poochie elevates the play of the guys around him. He has the drive and the will. That's the guy who can play in college.

"My hope for Poochie or any other quarterback is they find a good situation and stick with it."

Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Year of the Quarterback: Stark County football star delivered Ivy League team's only 10-win season