So exactly how did Lynn Ray do it?
How do you teach five classes every day — mostly science — for more than three decades, then turn into the head football coach and win five state championships and 234 games while helping build a young program to where it is today, challenging for a state title every year?
How do you do that?
“They gave me a free period at the end of the day,” Lynn says with a little laugh. No, really, here’s how he did it.
“I always looked at it as having two full-time jobs,” Ray says as he prepares for his induction next month into the KHSAA Hall of Fame, one of just 37 Northern Kentuckians – nine of them football coaches starting with former Highands and Cincinnati Bengals head coach Homer Rice – to have earned a place among the 542 members in Kentucky’s most honored place for high school sports.
One more thing, Ray says, of how he did it: “I got up at 4:30 in the morning, whatever it took . . . I taught a little bit of everything but mostly physical science,” which is “an introduction to chemistry and physics.”
A soft-spoken, unassuming sort unlike the football coach stereotype, Ray does not look like the tough safety he was at Eastern Kentucky under NCAA Hall of Fame coach Roy Kidd. Just 168 pounds, it’s hard to imagine him coming up to take on a pulling offensive lineman more than 100 pounds heavier. But that’s what the position called for so that’s what Lynn did.
“It taught me one thing,” Ray said. “You have to love the game.”
Playing for Kidd was great preparation for his coaching career, Ray said. The one thing above all he learned? “He really treated everybody the same. That definitely affected me in handling players.”
Lynn lived on the first street in Boone County – Kentaboo Avenue in Florence – at a time when the likes of great Boone County players like Irv Goode and Allen Feldhaus and a coach like Rice Mountjoy – Hall of Famers all – were the names of the game before he arrived at Boone County High School.
“I grew up watching those guys,” Lynn says. Now he’s one of them.
After two years when no Northern Kentuckians were named to the KHSAA Hall of Fame, Lynn will be one of 13 newcomers enshrined April 26 at the Central Bank Center in Lexington in the 2026 class. He’ll have some 30 folks from CovCath down with him for the big evening.
Just in time, says Ray, who will turn 80 in August. “I don’t know if they’d have waited much longer,” he laughs.
One thing he really likes is how they’re pre-taping all the remarks of the honorees so no pressure to be perfect in your acceptance speech. “It’s a lot easier this way,” he says.
And for the folks who drive by CovCath’s campus on the Dixie Highway in Park Hills and see the perfect facilities highlighted by the Art’s Rental Field at Dennis Griffiin Stadium, maybe Lynn will tell them how things were when he got there, having been invited by former coach Tony Lanham, also an Eastern guy, to join him. But Lanham left for Lexington Bryan Station before Lynn got to Park Hills and he started out in Lexington for a few years.
And then CovCath called again. And Lynn said yes. But it was far from perfect. “We didn’t have a field, we’d do whatever we could to get one for games,” Ray recalls how they scrambled in those early days.
But as he looks back, “I was head coach for 31 years and I didn’t get fired,” he says of his top accomplishment. Although surviving a full season without a game field or a place to practice might have been his single greatest moment. In order to build the current stadium and track, they had to give up the practice field so the school’s S.C.O.R.E. Committee could finish the construction.
“We practiced at the Ludlow dump,” Lynn says of the property at the edge of town where Sleepy Hollow Road comes into town. No real field. No lines. No goal posts. Picking up trash after the weekend. Traffic cones to mark off a field and to simulate a goalpost, they would hold up their arms.
One plus, however, and this may say something to know about coaching football – or maybe any sport. “That’s the only year we didn’t miss an extra point,” Lynn says. Makes you think.
Here’s Lynn’s official KHSAA Hall of Fame citation:
Lynn Ray began his coaching tenure at Covington Catholic in 1975 and built the Colonels into a football powerhouse. The process was slow, but then it exploded with incredible success. Ray would win 234 games in a 30-year run, during which Covington Catholic became not only a state title contender but also won a pair of back-to-back Class 3A state championships in 1987 and 1988, again in 1993 and 1994, with his final title in 1997.
Ray was selected to coach the Commonwealth All-Stars in the 1990 Kentucky-Tennessee All-Star game, was named the 1992 Coach-of-the-Year in Kentucky by the Courier-Journal and was among the coaches who first organized the Kentucky Football Coaches Association in 1993.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.