Righting the ship: How the Danville Admirals got back to winning football games
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Danville starts 3-0 after ending a 23-game losing streak under new leadership.
- Coach Stonebraker has rebuilt morale and culture through offseason preparation.
- Freshmen QB Dillon Cruver and RB Jayvian Meaux contributed six total TDs.
It’s too soon to say Danville football is back.
But there’s only one team in Kentucky’s “Title Town” that is 3-0 to start the season.
The Admirals didn’t slip from an 11-time state championship program to one that lost 23 games in a row — the commonwealth’s longest losing streak entering this season — overnight.
Getting back to the Class 2A finals begins with winning the day, every day.
“Every time I look at my team, they play hard. I love it,” said junior wideout Trinden Sellers, who endured unthinkable winless seasons at Danville each of his first two years. “The atmosphere is so much different. Everybody has more confidence. Everybody’s coming here ready to play. There’s not a single thought in our head, ‘Oh, we’re going to lose because we lost our last six games.’ It’s 0-0. Let’s try to get our first win, again. That’s all it is.”
Sellers caught two touchdown passes from freshman quarterback Dillon Cruver during Danville’s 41-13 win at Anderson County (1-2) on Friday. Freshman running back Jayvian Meaux scored four touchdowns, including a 37-yard breakaway to cap the Admirals’ opening drive of the second half.
“We started four freshmen on offense tonight. We’ve got a bright future here. We really do,” said Danville coach Steve Stonebraker, who took over a program that won its last state title by going 15-0 under Clay Clevenger, a championship winning player and coach for the school who was inexplicably fired after the 2020 season.
That move roiled the community and eventually led to the next Danville schools superintendent offering the former coach an apology for the way it was handled. Clevenger is now the head coach at Somerset.
Stonebraker is the third Admirals head coach since. Longtime Anderson County coach Mark Peach went 8-5 his first year and 5-7 before stepping away in 2022. Longtime Bryan Station coach Frank Parks did not record a win in his two seasons.
“It was, obviously, hard. But that’s all in the past,” Sellers said. “We’ve got to move on and put our thoughts on the next game. That’s what we did. That’s what we’ve been doing.”
Stonebraker steps up to the task
Stonebraker developed a reputation over his career for rebuilding programs. Casey County hadn’t had a winning season since 2010 when he arrived in 2016. They had four winning campaigns over his six years there, including going 10-2 twice. Adair County was 3-7 in 2022. Stonebraker took over there in 2023 and went 7-4 and 10-2 the next two years.
With respect to those programs, Danville is a different deal.
Stonebraker wanted that challenge.
“There’s no doubt that the ceiling is higher here,” he told the Herald-Leader earlier this week. “I tell people all the time that everything has been better than I anticipated it to be. Whether that’s community support, whether that’s administrative support, whether that’s the response from the kids and the work ethic and drive that they have.”
Danville also has the distinction of being only one half of the community’s high school football championship legacy. Over the last two and a half decades, Boyle County, the school 2.1 miles down the road, surpassed the Admirals with 12 state titles, including four in a row in Class 4A from 2020 to 2024 during Danville’s steep decline.
Though Boyle County (2-1) lost its first regular-season game in three years to Lexington Catholic on Friday, the Rebels remain one of Class 4A’s top contenders.
“That’s part of the challenge and that’s part of the fun, to be quite honest. That would be a thing that would probably scare a lot of people away from the job,” Stonebraker said. “The biggest thing for us in any rebuilding circumstance is you’ve got to worry about yourself. I’m not worried about what’s going on across town. We’re worried about Danville. We’re going to take care of Danville kids as best we can. And that is on the field, that’s in the classroom, that’s in the community.”
School administrators canceled the annual “Title Town” series between the schools during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It has not resumed. Stonebraker hopes to bring the rivalry game back one day.
“That’s definitely a goal,” he said. “That’s a great game for the community. We, obviously, started at square one when I arrived here, so, there’s a little bit of a hill to climb before we make that worthwhile for either program.”
Danville puts in the work and throws out excuses
The Admirals’ reconstruction began in January as Stonebraker instilled his priorities upon being named head coach last December.
“There was a renewed spirit upon my arrival. But it takes a lot of work. You’re not going to win games with press conferences and social media posts. You win games by the preparation in the offseason, in the preseason and during game week,” Stonebraker said. “They bought into everything that we wanted to do. They bought in in the weight room and how we were changing the culture. And they’ve worked so hard.”
Danville’s problems weren’t dissimilar to the ones Stonebraker encountered at his other stops.
“You navigate that, and you have a plan, and you attack it,” he said.
The results, so far, are a 49-12 win against Fort Knox, a 12-10 win against Fairdale and Friday’s rout of Anderson County. Admirals fans packed the visiting stands and lined the fence around the Bearcats’ home field.
Undefeated Class 4A Lincoln County will pose a bigger challenge next week. The path to a district championship will go through Class 2A No. 4 Lexington Christian.
Though building for the future, Stonebraker knows he’s also expected to win now.
“One of the things we did to finish up our camp was we burned excuses in a fire pit,” Stonebraker said. “Every player, every coach, wrote an excuse down and burned it in the fire pit. And my excuse was that I’m not ever going to make the comment, ‘Hey, it’s just my first year here, so we’ll be better down the road.’
“I want to be good this year. That was my thing for the seniors. I’m not going to mess them over. I’m here to fight as hard as I can for them and be the best we can be in 2025.”
This story was originally published September 6, 2025 at 11:21 AM.
