Area native receives state football honor

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The Indiana Football Coaches Association recently presented Brownstown native Gil Speer with the Ken Leffler Award.

The award is given to a person who contributed to the IFCA North-South All-Star Game and provided service to the IFCA.

Leffler was a longtime member of the IFCA and the head coach at Scecina High School in Indianapolis.

Speer has been an IFCA member for 30-plus years.

He has been supporting the North-South game selling tickets, at the gate on game night, for more than two decades.

He was an All-Star coach for the South in 2001.

Speer has held various positions at the region level in the IFCA.

He created the first Coaching Leadership masters course for IFCA members and continues in the role of Director of Professional Development for the IFCA, providing professional growth opportunities for IFCA member coaches attending clinics and conferences.

Speer attended Hanover College and received his Master’s Degree from Indiana University.

He began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at Indiana University under head coach Sam Wyche and then for Indiana University’s winningest football coach, Bill Mallory.

Speer was the head coach at Northwest High School in Indianapolis and defensive coordinator at Greenfield and Pike High Schools.

He joined the Franklin College football program in 2015, following a successful career in high school coaching at Hamilton Southeastern and Zionsville, as the defensive coordinator at those two schools.

Speer helped them win 73 percent of their games, five conference championships, four sectional championships, two regional titles, one semistate championship and an appearance in the Class 4A state championship contest in 1997.

Those defenses at Zionsville and HSE allowed only an average of 15 points per game, and were traditionally in the top-10 in the state.

Speer coached eight All-State and All-Star players at the linebacker position.

Speer presently is an instructor and department chair for the Business and Entrepreneurial Leadership program at Zionsville and was an adjunct instructor for educational leadership courses at Marian University.

Gil and his wife, Julie, who is a health and physical education instructor, with their two sons, now lives in Indianapolis and commutes to Franklin College for coaching duties there.

He is the son of Gilbert Jr. and Sharon Speer of Brownstown.

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