When coach Woody McMillen says everybody’s all in for the Ludlow High School football team, he means everybody, from the best players to the guys on the scout team to all the supportive fans in the Ludlow student body and the Ludlow community. Even his wife, Jenny, the director of student services at the high school and Goetz Elementary.
“My wife is a big fan,” said McMillen, a Ludlow graduate. “She likes to help us out with motivational quotes. She’ll find one she likes and pass it along to me. Every now and then I’ll read one to the players.”
During the district schedule following the Panthers’ underwhelming 1-3 start to the season, McMillen was given a motivational quote by his wife. He really liked it. It was simple, which is the way the coach likes to keep things.
“It’s hard to beat a team that never gives up,” coach McMillen said. “I don’t know where she found it, but I like the quote. It works for us. We struggled early, laid an egg against Dayton then turned things around. We’ve allowed scores on the first drive of the game and got behind early. We went to work and tried to get back into the game and won some because we’ve got a bunch of guys who never give up.”
It’s a powerful concept but also an easy one for teenagers to grasp, which makes it perfect for the practical McMillen, who’s had a lot of success by not overthinking and simply doing the best with what he has.
Example 1: Walton-Verona. He started the football team from scratch and built from the ground up, successfully laying the foundation for what would become a thriving program. Somehow, McMillen had more than 40 players his first season in 2008 and the Bearcats won four games while posting a pair of shutouts and limiting two other opponents to one touchdown. The Bearcats went 2-8 the first year after he left the program.
Example 2: Bellevue. He helped the Tigers double their roster size in two seasons. They had 22 players two years before he arrived. McMillen’s first Bellevue team in 2015 numbered 44 players. The Tigers never took a step back in the victory column in his four years there, going 3-8, 3-8, 5-6 and 5-6. After he left, Bellevue went 3-36 over the next four years.
Example 3: Ludlow. In McMillen’s first season as head coach, Ludlow has won seven of its last eight games including two playoff games in the same postseason for the first time this century. The Panthers went 6-4 during the regular season. They won the Class A District 4 race with a 3-0 record, their first district title in decades. They defeated Bellevue and Newport in the first two rounds of the playoffs by a combined score of 74-20 after picking themselves up after a 50-26 regular season-ending loss to Paris. They exacted revenge on Newport in the second round of the playoffs after losing to the Wildcats during the regular season, improving their record to 8-4.
On those occasions when the Panthers were down, the coach said they simply got right back up. McMillen, who’s also Ludlow’s baseball coach, co-athletic director and a history teacher, has been around long enough to know that athletes who refuse to give up remain powerful in motion because they are still going. He knows there is sneaky upside in a team that never gives up because you can never know what its full potential is if the possibilities are infinite.
In McMillen’s mind, you fail only if you give up. If you keep trying, you haven’t failed yet because you’re still in the game. As far as the coach is concerned, if you don’t give up, there’s still a question mark next to whatever it is you want to achieve. When you give up, the question mark becomes a period.
This season, Ludlow is ending things with an exclamation mark.
“It feels pretty good,” said sophomore two-way standout Dameyn Anness, the Kentucky Football Coaches Association’s Class A District 4 player of the year. “The past few years had been a little iffy. Coach has made a big difference.”
McMillen, elevated from Ludlow assistant, has fashioned the Panthers into a generational team. Make that two generations. Ludlow is in the regional final for the first time in nearly half a century. With a win Friday night at Kentucky Country Day, the Panthers can accomplish something else not seen in Ludlow in nearly 50 years. The last time the Panthers made the state semifinals was 48 years ago. It was 1975, the year Ludlow won its lone state championship.
Fast forward to 2023. McMillen has Ludlow ranked second in Kentucky Class A in rushing, 11th in scoring, first in passing defense and fifth in rushing defense among teams reporting statistics to the KHSAA.
“I do know our defense has been solid, but I really don’t pay a lot of attention to that stuff,” McMillen said. “What I want to know is can we fly to the ball on defense, which we have been.”
The Panthers rank sixth in Class A in scoring margin, which means Ludlow is blowing out a lot of teams. The Panthers have won seven games by three touchdowns or more and five games by at least 32 points.
“We all heavily respect coach,” said Anness, who ranks sixth in Class A in rushing yards, eighth in scoring and 16th in tackles. “He made football fun again.”
Anness has played a large role in the fun. He and the multiprong Ludlow rushing attack has rolled up chunks of yardage. Anness has amassed a team-leading 1,156 rushing yards on 7.1 yards per carry and scored 19 total touchdowns. Breckin Ralston has rushed for 440 yards on more than 10 yards per carry with five touchdowns. Miles Garrett, Aiden Smith Baxley, Spencer Brandenburg and Byron Conley have essentially combined to be a 1,000-yard rusher, totaling 1,086 yards and 17 TDs between them.
The Panthers can pass it in their flexible hybrid scheme. Quarterback Jackson Mays has thrown for 1,074 yards and 12 TDs. Receiver Ethan Powell has caught 28 passes for 484 yards with five TDs. Anness has 17 catches for 215 yards and four TDs. But Ludlow’s bread and butter is the relentlessly battering rushing attack. The Panthers keep it simple by running it an average of 33 times per game while averaging 7.6 yards per carry.
All that running coupled with the ability to complete passes and extend drives has kept opposing offenses off the field for long stretches at a time against the Panthers’ hybrid 3-4 defense, a group that’s proved to be quite stingy. The Panthers are giving up 15 points per game, ranking fourth in Class A.
“We hope our offense eventually wears you down. Sometimes we’ll show up in a Power-I and just run it right at you,” McMillen said. “On defense, we try to keep it very simple because the last thing you want to do is coach aggression out of your players. We go with three up front. We have four linebackers and four in the secondary. It’s simple. If you line up in a spread, it looks like a 3-4. But, if you get heavy on us, it can look like an old-time 5-2.”
Anness and Ralston are the outside linebackers. Smith Baxley and Matthew Engel are the inside linebackers. They play behind rotating nose guards Kaden Morrison and Shawn Davidson and ends Matt Brock and Carson Evans. Manning the secondary are cornerbacks Conley and Elijah Perrin and safeties Powell and Brandenburg, the team’s leading tackler with 103. Anness has 93 tackles, 10 tackles for loss, three sacks, two forced fumbles, one returned for a TD, and two interceptions, one returned for a score. Smith Baxley leads the team with 15 tackles for loss. Evans leads with 6.5 sacks. Powell leads with four interceptions. Brock has a team-high four fumble recoveries.
Another key to Ludlow’s success: Despite having just 41 players on the roster, many play just one way.
“At a small school, you have a lot of practices with ones vs. twos but a lot of times we have first stringers going up against first-stringers,” McMillen said. “Our practices are extremely competitive. It sometimes gets a little rowdy because nobody wants to give any ground. We’ve got guys on the scout team who really bust their butt, so we recognize those guys and give them playing time so they’ll keep busting it.”
The team’s young breakout star loves the dynamic at play during the week.
“Go hard in practice to compete in games,” Anness said. “Everybody’s doing that and we’re winning.”
It’s that simple.