GREENVILLE – The Green Wave football program got a significant boost with the hiring of veteran football coach Steve Channell, an Ohio High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame Coach. Coach Channel is currently the director of the Ohio High School Football Coaches Association North vs. South Classic game director.
“We’re happy to have coach Channell on board as our football coach,” said Greenville Athletic Director Aaron Shaffer. “We are fortunate to have a coach of his caliber come in and express some interest in our position. He understands the challenges here.”
“Coach Channell has over 300 career wins, multiple conference championships at two previous coaching locations, many playoff appearances, and an above 500 playoff record,” Shaffer added. “The list goes on and on. He’s a tremendous coach. His resume speaks for itself.”
Coach Channel spent 21 seasons as Edgewood’s head coach. Under Channell, Edgewood won 11 conference titles, had 10 playoff teams, and played in the 2003 D-II state championship.
Channell moved on to oversee a dramatic reversal in the Miamisburg High School football program. Miamisburg football hadn’t had a winning season since 2003 in the now-defunct Mid-Miami League when Channell took over in 2012. From 2008-11, the Vikings were twice at 1-9 and had just six combined wins.
That immediately changed when Channell switched Miamisburg to a wing-T offense and a noticeable defensive upgrade, which produced a 7-3 debut season. That signaled the start of Vikings football relevance, which produced four consecutive playoff teams and a combined 52-24 overall record under Channell.
Coach Channell has assisted the Troy High School football program for the past three seasons.
“Coaching is a skill, and it is very challenging,” Channel said when questioned about taking over a 0-20 team over the past two seasons. “It is easy to go to schools that have had success. Not many coaches want to go to schools with limited success because of the challenge. For me, that is the beauty of it – going and taking a program that has been down and building because the process and watching it develop with the excitement of a community and the players, and the parents is something that every community and kid should experience. Being an assistant the last three years urged me to be a head coach again and run my own program again, really surfaced this year.”
Coach Channell believes discipline is essential for a successful football program.
“You can’t have success if you don’t have discipline,” said Channell. “Undisciplined players, coaches, teams have limited success so discipline will be a big piece of our program. I’m an old-school guy. I grew up watching Vince Lombardi’s and Woody Hayes’s teams, so we’re from the same generation, we know how important discipline is in everyday life.”
GHS athletic director, Coach Shaffer, was the first coach to lead a Green Wave team on the stadium’s new artificial turf. Coach Channell will be the first Greenville coach to lead the Wave into the new stadium, to open the 2025 varsity football season.
“When you go to a program like this and the community, you ask yourself some few basic questions,” said Coach Channell. “Is the support of the community there? I think it is here. Greenville is a tight-knit, self-contained community, so your ingredients are here, and the support is here. I think the desire is here to have a successful football program.”
“Ironically, we open up at home vs Eaton, where I graduated from, so that is an interesting twist. It’s great the community is making with the field, the fieldhouse, now the final piece being the bleachers. It speaks about the commitment they have as a district.”
“High school sports is a unifier for communities and Ohio Football is a pretty big part of that unifying piece for community,” Channell continued. “There is nothing like a Friday night during the fall when you see the lights come on and the community come out. That brings everybody together. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it and talking about it because that’s a special experience that we share and will share here at Greenville.”
“Coach Channell is excited to be here and we’re excited to have him but most importantly I am excited for our kids to know who will lead them on Friday nights this fall,” Shaffer stated. “It’s been a long process, an up and down nontraditional process, but we got to a point where we found a coach that we believe in, that we think will help move our program forward into the future.”
Coach Channell was approved at the Thursday night Greenville School Board meeting and was already spending the day meeting with Greenville students Friday morning.
“He’s here meeting kids, shaking hands, and getting to know faces,” said Shaffer. “He has a list of kids he needs to focus on and know who they are. He has a roster in his hand, and he has four or five pages of notes about kids he knows from coaching against us and researching us. He’s a prepared guy who will put us in a position to win some football games.”
“I am meeting with kids this afternoon at the end of the school day,” Channell said. “Any interested kid, I will be holding individual meetings with players, with their parents starting in a week or so. I want to do everything I can to reach out and bring as many people into the program as possible – kids, players, community members, whatever.”
“A high school football program is a lot bigger that one person, it’s a community, it takes a lot of different support groups whether it be the boosters, people running concessions, people helping Coach Shaffer take ticket, whatever it is, it takes a lot and it’s not one person, it’s a whole community,” he added. “We will be reaching out to players daily.”
Playing high school football and all high school programs present lifetime benefits.
“The benefits of participating in high school football or high school sports are one of those benefits, those long-lasting relationships you build that you will maintain for the rest of your life, and all those attributes that you gain by participation, you will have for the rest of your life,” Coach Channell said. “It will be the foundation of your adult life. You listen to any athlete, former athlete, retired athlete, talk about their high school football coach or high school football expierence, they always come back to that, the foundation what was from that high school program and that’s where they built their career from, the bottom up – they learned those values. I am excited to be here.”
