A Division II school in Pennsylvania just snapped a 19-game home losing streak. Now, it’s out for more

Clarion University football's five-year-long headache is over. Now, with a seasoned coach at the helm, the Golden Eagles have their sights set on bigger prizes

Last Thursday, San Marino made history.

The European microstate, which has only about 33,000 residents and covers just 23.5 square miles, has fielded a national men’s soccer team since 1987, but failed to earn a victory in its first 176 international matches, 171 of which were losses. In a UEFA Nations League game last week, however, a win 37 years in the making finally arrived, with San Marino defeating Liechtenstein, 1-0.

Later that same day, a different, admittedly shorter drought ended.

For nearly five full years – 1,797 days, to be exact – the football team at Clarion University, a Division II school in western Pennsylvania, hadn’t won a home game. Like San Marino, that grueling wait finally drew to a close. After opening its 2024 season with a 24-point win against Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference foe Millersville, the Golden Eagles held Lincoln University to just 253 total yards and 3.8 yards per play on their way to picking up a 20-9 victory.

The context of the triumph was just as important. The win put a cathartic end to a 19-game home losing streak that began in Oct. 2019, four months before a vast majority of the country had even heard of COVID-19.

Clarion had come close before, near-wins that would have made the skid a momentary bump in the road instead of something a journalist half a country away would be writing about.

Its third loss in that streak, a Sept. 2021 setback against Lake Erie College, came by just five points. The following week, against Millersville, it got even closer, this time losing by four. The Golden Eagles fell even more painfully shy in recent years. Six of those 19 home losses came by a single score. Of those six narrow defeats, three came in 2023, a trio of losses that were decided by a combined nine points. It wasn’t as if the program were incapable of winning, either, as it went 5-14 on the road during that time, including a 3-2 mark in 2022.

On a glorious September night, they finally got to celebrate. Many of the 1,997 fans inside Clarion’s 5,000-seat Memorial Stadium left with the joy of seeing their team win in person for the first time in a long time. After the game, the players rushed to ring the Victory Bell, a bell painted in the school’s colors, blue and gold, that made its debut in 2015.

After coming so close and carrying the weight of an ignominious bit of history, the Golden Eagles had broken through.

“You could tell with the kids and the fans,” Clarion coach Raymond Monica told me about the excitement around his team after the win. “You could definitely tell. There’s no question about it. They were very excited.”

Clarion’s winding football odyssey

Since being founded in 1867 as a seminary, Clarion has made itself known in the broader world of sports.

The school has a decorated wrestling history, having produced eight NCAA champions, including, most famously, Kurt Angle. As recently as 2021, former Golden Eagles wrestler Bekzod Abdurakhmonov won a bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics while representing his native Uzbekistan. The university has produced John Calipari, who played basketball there from 1980-82, and Pete Vuckovich, the 1982 American League Cy Young winner who’s perhaps best known for playing fictional Yankees slugger Clu Haywood in “Major League.”

Naturally, at a school in a small town only about 75 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, there’s football, as well.

Since playing their first game all the way back in 1926, the Golden Eagles have enjoyed stretches of sustained success.

In 1952, they secured their first undefeated season, going 9-0 and defeating East Carolina in the Lions Bowl, a short-lived postseason game played in Salisbury, N.C. For nearly two dozen years, from 1965-87, they were a force, going 163-57-4, recording no losing seasons and winning four PSAC championships. That run reached its peak from 1976-83, when they went 64-18-1 and won three of those four PSAC titles.

In 1996, they made their first and only appearance in the Division II NCAA football championship, where they won their first two games before losing a 19-18 heartbreaker to eventual national champion Northern Colorado in the semifinals. At the end of the season, they were awarded the Lambert Cup, given to the top team in the east.

From there, however, things fell off, and quickly. In the three years after the NCAA playoff run, Clarion went a combined 9-22. Though they secured their sixth and final PSAC championship in 2000, the Golden Eagles have had just two winning seasons since 2003.

On top of that, Clarion, like many colleges in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, has faced institutional difficulties in recent years. Today, its enrollment is about half of the 7,346 students it had in 2009. In 2022, with the PASSHC mired in budget troubles from declining enrollment and revenue, six universities were consolidated into two, with Clarion joining California University (located in California, Pa., not the state) and Edinboro University to become Pennsylvania Western University, though each of those schools fields its own athletic teams.

Months before Clarion officially became PennWest Clarion, the university made a move.

Is the end of a skid a sign of brighter days ahead?

Raymond Monica could have very easily remained where he was.

The Louisiana native was in his home state, living near family and serving as the defensive coordinator at Southeastern Louisiana, which has become a regular FCS playoff presence over the past decade.

In Feb. 2022, however, Clarion came calling. The university needed a new football coach and thought that Monica – who had an accomplished tenure at Division II Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania from 2006-12 – could be just the man for the job. Feeling the urge to return to a state (err, commonwealth) that had become something of a second home, Monica and his wife, Linda, packed their car and drove north.

For the man roaming the Golden Eagles’ sideline as they snapped their onerous losing streak, the win only resonates so much. He was happy for his players, the fans and the university, sure, but for him, it was simply a positive step in a much longer journey.

Monica’s a football lifer, a coaching stalwart who has been in the college game since 1988. From 1998-2005, he was the defensive coordinator at Temple, where he oversaw units that finished in the top 20 nationally in scoring defense in consecutive seasons in the early 2000s. In Sports Illustrated’s 2003 college football preview edition, Monica was hailed as being "the best in the nation at getting ordinary players to do extraordinary things."

From there, he went to Kutztown, which gave him his first head coaching job ahead of the 2006 season. He took over a struggling program, one that had gone 6-14 in the two seasons prior to his hiring. He started relatively slowly, never finishing better than 5-6 in his first four seasons, but by 2010, his years of hard work building a foundation paid off. The Golden Bears went 10-2 that season, more than tripling their win total from the previous season, and made the Division II playoffs for the first time ever. The following year, they surpassed that high bar, going 11-2, winning the PSAC and advancing to the second round of the NCAA playoffs.

Even though he hasn’t coached at the school since 2012, his imprint there remains. Kutztown has made the NCAA playoffs in four of the past five seasons and last season, it made it all the way to the semifinals.

During his time with the Golden Bears, he got his first glimpse at Clarion, which Kutztown faced off against regularly early in his tenure. When he was approached about the Golden Eagles’ job, he only needed so much of a reminder about his potential new home.

It’s at least part of the rationale behind hiring Monica. Though he may not sound like it based on his accent, he was familiar with Pennsylvania and, most importantly, knew how to win in the PSAC.

At Clarion, he was tasked with succeeding Chris Weibel, a former all-American quarterback at the school (he was one of the stars of the famed 1996 team) who was inducted into its athletic hall of fame in 2010. After 11 seasons as an assistant, Weibel was the Golden Eagles’ head coach from 2015-21, a run that had some high notes – namely, a 7-4 record in his first season – but failed to deliver consistent success.

Under Monica, Clarion has made some needed strides. After going winless in 2021, the season before he took over, it won three games his first year. Though their record got worse – going from 3-8 in 2022 to 2-9 in 2023 – the Golden Eagles were statistically better in their second season under Monica. They lost games by an average of just 9.36 points per game, down from 14.82 the previous year, with four of their nine defeats coming by seven points or fewer. When rebuilding a program, there’s a familiar axiom. First you lose big. Then you lose close. After that, you win close. And, if you’re lucky enough, you win big.

This could very well be the season in which those painful what-ifs become something more tangible. With the win against Lincoln, Clarion is off to its first 2-0 start in five years. Should they win Saturday at Shippensburg, the Golden Eagles would be 3-0 for the first time since 2015.

As his work continues, there’s a moment that Monica often thinks back to, one that’s foundational to his broader coaching philosophy.

While one of his Temple teams was warming up before a game against Pitt, he met with longtime Pitt assistant Bob Junko at the 50-yard line at the old Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. As the two chatted about coaching turnover in college football and how patience was increasingly thin among athletic department leaders, Junko turned to Monica.

“He said ‘Raymond, if you do stuff over and over, basically you just win,’” Monica told me. “I never forgot that. That’s what basically I did at Kutztown. I got there in March and it took five years to really get things turned.”

Maybe, just maybe, that turning point came last Thursday for Clarion. And if Monica has his way, a home win won’t need to feel like quite as much of a celebration again.

(Photos: Clarion Athletics, Kutztown Athletics, valued Twitter user Anthony Termini)