What started as a pickup game for local teens has grown into a multi-generational annual touch football game with original players, their children, partners, spouses and old friends
By Steve Mitchell, Ashland.news
A Thanksgiving touch-football game notched its 48th straight year in Ashland on Thursday.
What began more than four decades ago as a post-turkey calorie burn for a group of Ashland teenagers has evolved into an annual tradition that now weaves together the original players, their kids, future in-laws and longtime friends.
The Turkey Bowl traces its origins to the late 1970s, when Paul Schmelling, then a senior on the Ashland High School football team, gathered about 10 friends for a casual game on the school’s practice field. His younger brother, Max, now an elementary school teacher, joined as “an extra body.”
Paul said the early games were simply a way to build an appetite before Thanksgiving dinner.
“When you were 13 to 18, you’d eat everything in front of you and look for more,” he said. “We thought we’d go have a football game and work up an appetite, and that’s exactly what we did.”
The group played rain or shine. Max recalls one year when heavy rain turned the field to mud. “We thought it was the greatest thing, sliding on the field,” he said.
Eventually, the high school’s athletic director shut them down, saying they were “wrecking the field.” The crew moved the game to the YMCA, where the roster swelled to as many as 30 players. With the bigger crowd came more competition—and more injuries.
“Every year it was like, OK, who’s gonna get injured?” said John Sager, an Ashland primary care physician and one of the game’s original players.
Paul, who played football in high school and college, said the injuries eventually became too much. “It was hard for me to give up,” he said. “Even in the years I could do it, the next day it felt like I needed someone to take me out of my car with a fork.”
Over time, the once all-boys tradition changed. Wives, girlfriends and kids began to join in. Max remembers the first time Paul arrived with a girl ready to play. “I think we all looked at each other like, ‘I don’t think we should have girls here,’” he said. “And then she was in the huddle — and after that, it was normal.”
Now the game is fully family-run. Max’s daughters, Kyra, 29, and Marina, 21, play each year, as do Sager’s children, Laurel, 32, and Ben, 30, along with nieces, nephews and partners. Spectators, like Sager’s father, Bill, a retired Ashland physician who once rode his horse out to watch.
The rules have stayed few and simple: touch, not tackle; and rotate quarterbacks so everyone gets to throw at least once.
Not even COVID stopped the game’s streak. In 2020, families broke into small masked pods and played short scrimmages at separate fields to keep the tradition alive.
“It was like, we’ve got to do this,” Sager said.
What began with Paul and his friends, moved onto Max and Sager, has endured — in part — due to keeping the tradition going every year.
“We always try to make it every year,” Sager said. “It’s become this extended family.”
Email Ashland.news associate editor Steve Mitchell at [email protected].
