From Scioto's Bench to Auburn's Sideline

Local News

Here’s a city program we hadn’t given much thought to before: Dublin helps neighborhoods pay for things like landscaping, lighting, benches and entrance improvements.

City Council approved $20,000 this week through its Beautify Your Neighborhood program, giving $5,000 each to Bishop’s Run, Llewellyn Farms, Wellington Place and Willow Grove.

The projects range from wildflowers and stone benches at Bishop’s Run to refreshed landscaping and lighting at neighborhood entrances. Wellington Place will use its money for erosion control and improvements around two ponds.

The program has actually been around since 2011. Neighborhood associations have to match the city’s contribution, and the projects generally involve areas within city right-of-way that the associations maintain.

It’s an interesting use of city money. Dublin’s thinking is that improving these highly visible neighborhood areas benefits the appearance of the broader community — even though the money is going toward projects proposed by individual neighborhood associations.

Whether you think that’s something the city should help pay for is another question. But apparently, if your Dublin neighborhood wants to spruce up its entrance, City Hall may be willing to chip in.

Local News

With college football getting underway, we thought it was worth sharing a pretty remarkable Dublin football success story.

Auburn’s new head coach, Alex Golesh, is a former Dublin Scioto football player. And the story of how he got from here to one of the biggest jobs in college football is a good one.

Golesh was born in Moscow and moved to the U.S. with his family when he was seven. They first lived in Brooklyn before eventually landing in Dublin, where Golesh got his chance to play organized football.

He wasn’t some superstar at Scioto destined for big-time college football. Golesh was an undersized lineman who never became a regular starter. But he understood the game, helped other players get lined up and apparently had the coaching part in him long before anyone was paying him to do it.

One of the people who noticed was Scioto assistant coach Jeff Jones. The two lived in the same neighborhood, Jones would give Golesh rides to practice, and over time he became much more than just his football coach. Golesh has said that relationship was part of what made him want to become a coach himself.

So he did. Golesh went to Ohio State, started as a student assistant and spent the next couple of decades working his way through college football. He eventually helped build one of the country’s best offenses at Tennessee, landed his first head coaching job at South Florida and, late last year, was hired to take over Auburn.

And here’s our favorite part: Jeff Jones is still with him. Golesh eventually hired his old Scioto coach and brought him along to Auburn, where Jones now works in player development.

So if you catch an Auburn game this fall, there’s a pretty great Dublin story standing on that sideline: a former Scioto kid running the program, with his old Scioto coach there alongside him.