Original UCF QB leads Seminole to first state title

The first image that Sanford Seminole High School athletic director Mike Powers received of Mike Cullison was of one from a friend.

Mike Kirby, the Parks and Recreation director for Sanford and good friend of Powers, described a time when Cullison, who was the starting quarterback for UCF during its inaugural football season in 1979, coached his son in the Central Florida All-Star game.

He described Cullison as a "big surfer dude" who went out to coach the game wearing a Hawaiian T-shirt with shorts and flip-flops and was great at motivating the kids.

So when the clean-cut 50-year-old Cullison went in to apply for the job as the head coach of the Seminoles two years ago, the image wasn't quite the same for Powers.

"He comes to the interview, and he has a coat and tie on," Powers said. "He looks like he is asleep. I don't know anything about football, but my first observation that I wrote on my sheet was: 'I think this guy is asleep.' "

The next couple of minutes in the interview are what changed the fate of the 106-year-old program and also changed the mind of Powers. Cullison was smart, knew football and knew how to communicate.

"Two sentences later, I wrote down that I think this is our guy," Powers said.

That decision paid off. Cullison led the Seminoles to their first Class 6A state title, defeating two-time state champion Miami Northwestern 27-21 in the Citrus Bowl Dec. 20. Even though the game ended almost a month ago, Cullison is still on cloud nine.

"Every day, something else comes to mind," Cullison said. "It's such a hard task to get to the state championship game. I'm starting to feel a little bit more honored to have been there."

But the road to get to the game was just as special as the way his team won it. It all started when Cullison took the job at Seminole. He stepped down as the head coach at Jones High School and wasn't employed when he interviewed for the job.

The 1980 UCF graduate had served on numerous coaching staffs, including schools such as Olympia, Palm Bay and Edgewater.

"I had remembered this school as having great tradition," Cullison said. "I coached at Edgewater for a while and they used to be in our conference and they were good, very good."

Before Cullison took the job, the Seminoles were anything but good. The team posted consecutive 1-9 seasons and had problems internally. In his first season, the team went 4-5, but there was still trouble within the team, especially among star players Aravious "Ray Ray" Armstrong, Andre Debose and Dyron Dye.

"When I first got here, there was a lot of finger-pointing," Cullison said. "I'm not saying it was all them, but it was across the board. We tried to change that mentality."

In the spring, the media focused on Armstrong, Debose and Dye, which made many teammates jealous.

"We called the kids in and said, 'OK, when you think of the New England Patriots, what do you think of?' " Cullison said. "Right off the top everyone says Tom Brady. I said 'OK, that's what these guys are … the face of our program.' "

Those players, especially Armstrong, helped Seminole open the season with two convincing wins over Hagerty High and DeLand, defeating both by a combined score of 63-6.

Then disaster struck. Armstrong sat out one game and Debose the next due to injuries, and Seminole lost its next two games to Spruce Creek and Dr. Phillips. Cullison's team found itself at 2-2 and questioning whether it was good enough to win without its superstars.

"Those two games that we lost, each game Andre didn't play in one game and Ray Ray didn't play in the other game," Cullison said. "Now, does that mean we are a lousy team? No, but I think what happens is that early in the season, our kids' psyche was 'Well, we need Andre to make a play here, but he is suspended or we need Ray to make a play, but he can't because he has a hurt shoulder.' "

Those stars came back, though, and so did Cullison's Seminoles. After their loss to Dr. Phillips, the Seminoles won six consecutive games to clinch a seed in the playoffs. In those games, the Seminoles outscored their opponents 253-29, including three shutouts.

"When we were 8-2 and going into the playoffs, we said, 'OK, that season is over,' " Cullison said. "Now we want to be 5-0. We are not going to talk about a state championship. We just want to be 5-0, and if that happens, we are state champions."

The road to 5-0 was a tough one. The Seminoles went through DeLand, Spruce Creek and Apopka before slipping past Boone in the final 44 seconds to advance to the championship game.

In that game, Cullison's Seminoles would be facing Miami Northwestern.

The Bulls had won two consecutive state championships and had won 46 of 47 games coming into the game.

The Bulls were trying to become the first team to win three consecutive championships since the playoff format was adopted in 1963.

None of that mattered to Cullison. He called a team meeting, pulled out a white board and wrote the word 'Northwestern' on the board. Below that, he wrote one sentence: '12 letters, it's nothing.'

"I just told them, straight up, that we are a good football team," Cullison said. "We are better than they are, and our kids believed it."

The game, held at the Citrus Bowl, would be a homecoming of sorts for Cullison, who played there while at UCF.

When Cullison enrolled in UCF, it didn't have a football program. He had transferred from Tusculum College in Tennessee in 1979, the very first semester that the school went by the name UCF.

At Tusculum, Cullison was on scholarship for baseball. When he transferred, he wanted to play baseball, but since he had already played in the fall for Tusculum, he wasn't allowed to play. The next best option was UCF's brand new football program. Cullison tried out and won the starting quarterback job for the Knights in 1979.