By John Raffel
Clare football coach Kelly Luplow hit the 200-win plateau early this season against Beaverton, and his impressive accomplishments haven’t been a surprise to those who have known him for a long time.
The 21-0 win over Beaverton in late September gave a Luplow a 200-81 record at Clare, with 15 Jack Pine Conference titles, including eight straight and 13 in the past 15 years. He also has coached Clare to 19 state playoff appearances. A highlight was 2009, when the Pioneers were Division 5 state runners-up.
Dan Haggart, now the Clare athletic director, was a 20-year coaching assistant to Luplow. “It’s consistency,” Haggart said. “He has high expectations and standards that he’s maintained throughout his coaching career.”
Pat Craven, Evart football coach, played during his high school days for Harrison against Luplow’s Clare teams. “I’ve known Kelly for a long time,” Craven said. “I’ve become fairly close with him. He’s helped me out on a number of occasions. We played 7-on-7s a couple of times every summer. Kelly has a very good football mind. He’s in a unique situation of having a tremendous coaching staff, a great football mind, combined with a tremendous football community in Clare. Those type of things seem to be rare. When you get those, they produce some special results.
“He spent time with me during the off-season one-on-one, showing me things, talking to me about different things, mentoring me. I have a lot of respect for him.”
Ben Bryant, Farwell football skipper, coaches against Luplow in the Jack Pine Conference. “He has a very good program going that the kids have [seen] since they’ve been young,” Bryant said. “He does a good job of keeping consistency in the program. His kids know what is expected from them. He has tons and tons of experience. He’s won a lot of games. He’s doing something right.”
Haggart has witnessed Luplow change philosophy when necessary. “We changed our offense from a power I team through his first few years as head coach in around 1996 or 1997 to running the splitback veer,” Haggart recalled. “That really kicked off a lot of success for us. Hall of Fame coach John Blankenship had been trying to get Kelly to do that for three or four years. We finally went to it.”
As he approaches the 30-year mark of coaching at Clare, people are wondering how much longer he may continue. “That’s a question people have asked me,” Haggart said. “He still loves the game and enjoys coaching. If that ever changes, then I’m sure he’ll make that decision. But I don’t see it happening for awhile.”
Luplow still teaches weight-training and physical education classes at Clare.
The Pioneers finished the regular season at 5-4. They opened the season against state powers Ithaca and Beal City, and lost two Jack Pine Conference games.
Luplow has usually downplayed the significance of milestones but realizes there’s something to treasure about reaching the 200 mark.
“Longevity is huge,” he said. “A lot of coaches nowadays don’t stay in it long enough to achieve something like that. You have to be willing to commit yourself to the program over a number of years to get something like this. There’s so many things. Once you convince kids coming through of their expectations, and once you have continuity in your coaching staff, that’s huge in any successful program.
“Then there’s all the talent. We’ve had a lot of nice talent come through, and they’ve adapted. They keep getting better every year, and we’ve always had good senior leadership. It’s a combination of all those things.”
Obviously, plenty has changed since 1987, Luplow’s first year coaching.
“The thing that hasn’t changed is, you run, you tackle, you throw the ball, you catch the ball, and do all those things,” Luplow said. “That’s the way it’s going to be. But the biggest change, in my opinion, has been the caliber of athletes people are turning out now because of different ways of training, not just kids in high school, but also in college and professional athletes. They’re bigger, faster, and stronger. That, over the last 10 to 20 years, has been huge.
“Technology is huge too, not only in filming of games and breaking down of the film, but also the technology in training the body and getting it to its optimum level of competition.”
Luplow still enjoys the job. “It’s such a time-consuming profession,” he said. “That’s another thing that’s changed. It’s year-round stuff. It never used to be that way. I still love the game. There’s ups and downs, but there is with everything. When push comes to shove, I wouldn’t want to do anything different.”