Kostelnik glad he picked Notre Dame
Notre Dames football fortunes hit rock bottom before Ara Parseghian turned around a failing football tradition when he joined the university in 1963. Playing a role in the resurrection of Notre Dame football was former Brownsville High School star Tom Kostelnik.
Brownsville had a run of outstanding centers on the football squad, John Shag Wolosky, Don Kostelnik and Bill Shelly to name a few. Tom Kostelnik fit right in with the best of them.
Kostelnik excelled on the football field, the basketball court, the baseball diamond and in track and field.
On the gridiron the Brownies were a competitive group during the seasons that Kostelnik played, but didn’t post a winning season. In 1958 — Kostelnik’s sophomore season — they went 3-6. In 1959 they posted a 3-7 mark and Kostelnik’s senior campaign in 1960 the team finished with a 4-6 record.
“We were competitive,” Kostelnik opined. “But we were struggling, from my perspective, with coaching. We didn’t seem to be as well prepared as the other teams. My sophomore year John Pringle was the coach and my last two years John Popovich was the head coach.
“We had some good players. We had Ron Matteucci, we had Gary Klingensmith, and Larry Lancaster was a good lineman. Paul Cesko, a younger guy that was a tight end, went on to North Carolina State. We had some talented players, but we just didn’t seem to be as well prepared as I recall as the other teams.”
Brownsville was a part of the Big Six and always played a tough schedule.
“We played Charleroi and Donora in the Big Six,” Kostelnik said. “Non-conference teams we played were Uniontown and Connellsville, and we played Har-Brack my senior year. We played a tough schedule.”
Kostelnik played center and linebacker for the Blue and White.
“When I went out for football in eighth grade, I went out for tight end,” Kostelnik remembered. “Jack Henck, who was the eighth grade coach, said, ‘You’re not a tight end. You’re a center. Your brother was a center; you are a center.’ I was typecast as a center, and I played linebacker.”
He garnered some nice honors during his high school career. Kostelnik was team captain his senior year and grabbed all-county, all-state and all-America honors.
“The awards were something you don’t really think about at the time,” Kostelnik stated. “But when the awards started coming in, it was definitely very rewarding after all the hard work you had put into it.”
Kostelnik played basketball at Brownsville under Frank Dankovich, and the Brownies were 0-14 in Section 5 play his sophomore season. They went 6-12 and 2-12 in section play his junior year and posted a 9-13 overall record and a 7-7 section mark in his senior campaign.
“We had some decent players on those teams,” Kostelnik said. “We just couldn’t put it together to consistently win. I enjoyed basketball, and I ran track. I didn’t play baseball in high school because Charlie Slick didn’t like people playing two sports at the same time, and he was the baseball coach. I didn’t play high school baseball, but I played Little League, Pony League, Advanced Pony League and I played in a couple of County Leagues during the summer.”
One of the highlights came in track and field.
“We won the WPIAL championship in the high hurdle relay,” Kostelnik offered. “That was all football players: Paul Cesko, Willibe Brooks, Ron Matteucci and me. Jack Henck was the track coach. I lived a couple of blocks from him, and I did all my workouts in the gym he had setup in his garage. He was a great coach who had us well prepared and in great condition.”
Even though he excelled in all sports, football was Kostelnik’s top sport.
“Football was number one,” he said. “I started out in eighth grade with the idea that I wanted to be good enough to earn a scholarship to pay for my education, and I was able to succeed doing that. Football was definitely number one.”
When Kostelnik graduated from Brownsville in 1961 he had slew of college scholarship offers to consider.
“I pretty much had my choice as to where I wanted to go,” Kostelnik reported. “As soon as Notre Dame came knocking, it was a no brainer. I used to watch Notre Dame on Sunday mornings all the time. As soon as I visited I knew I was going to Notre Dame.”
Things didn’t go smoothly on the field after Kostelnik’s freshman year in 1961. In his sophomore season he saw limited action, playing four minutes. The 1962 team under head coach Joe Kuharich went 5-5. As a junior in 1963, the Irish were coached by Hugh Devore.
Kostelnik logged 140 minutes of playing time as a junior, chalking up 27 tackles, breaking up a pair of passes and recovering one opponent fumble. The team finished with a 2-7 mark. Then a big change occurred with Ara Parseghian taking over as head coach for Kostelnik’s senior campaign in 1964.
“I fit in right away,” Kostelnik stated. “The one thing was there wasn’t as much pressure football-wise because freshman didn’t play back then. All we did is practice and most of the time we practiced against the varsity. Coach Kuharich was a professional style coach, and then he left to go to the pros. Then Hugh Devore who was the freshman coach when I was recruited stepped in as interim coach and it was just total confusion.”
The transformation of Notre Dame football occurred in 1964.
“Parseghian comes in and he was by far the finest coach that I played under. He was so organized; he was like a Jack Henck. Practices were such that you never stood still; there was always movement by everybody. He had shorter practices and got more work done than we did under the other coaches, and we were totally prepared for the games. He was a motivator; he could motivate the guys to do things they didn’t think they could do. I ended up playing linebacker for Parseghian.
The 1964 season is when they brought in the unlimited substitutions on timeouts, and you could go to the two-platoon structure. I had split time at center and linebacker as a sophomore and junior and was also injured my junior season. I got hit against Michigan State and ripped my right thigh muscle in half. That put me on crutches for six weeks, and I missed the last two games of the year. It took about 45 days to get the leg back in shape in order to be ready for spring football.”
The Irish had a miraculous turnaround in Parseghian’s first year at the helm, posting a 9-1 record. The only blemish was a heartbreaking 20-17 loss the Southern Cal.
“My freshman class had 33 guys and 11 were All-Americans,” Kostelnik explained. “There was talent in that class. Parseghian’s eyes popped when he saw the talent. He knew what to do with that talent. He moved people around and slotted players offensively and defensively. We had John Huarte, who won the Heisman Trophy, and end Jack Snow, and neither one of those guys played more than 15 minutes the previous year.
“The loss to Southern Cal is still fresh in my mind. I know exactly where I was in the last one minute 33 seconds when they scored. It was a bitter pill, especially with all the controversy about the officiating. There were three penalties during the game that were very controversial: one on a touchdown that we scored in the third quarter from the six-inch line. Our offensive tackle was called for holding. Then there was another penalty on the offense after a long gain early in the fourth quarter, and then on our final punt that gave USC the football. They called a holding penalty on the line and they couldn’t determine whether it was on me, as I was long snapper or on the guard. We asked who it was on the official gave us a number that wasn’t on the field. The first punt we stopped Mike Garrett at the USC 20-yard line. After the penalty and the re-kick and the return they picked up 45 yards on the penalty.”
Kostelnik was glad that he went to Notre Dame.
The senior year made up for everything,” he gushed. “Even though we lost and didn’t play in bowl games back then, six of us got picked to play in the North-South Shrine Game in Miami on Christmas day. It was a great decision to go to Notre Dame and I ended up with a great education.”
He bypassed pro football and entered the business world.
Kostelnik worked for Price Waterhouse Cooper in Cleveland for a year and was drafted during the Vietnam conflict and was in the Army for two years. He stayed stateside.
In 1968 he went back to Price Waterhouse Cooper for six years. In 1974 he joined a small company for four years and then moved on to Lampson and Sessions.
He got his masters from Baldwin Wallace and left Lampson Sessions in1993. He started his on management consulting business in 1995, London Capital Corp. He retired in 2005.
Kostelnik, 67, and his wife of 43 years the former Connie Wardman of Brownsville reside in Peoria, Ariz.
George Von Benko’s “Memory Lane” columns appear in the Sunday editions of the Herald-Standard. He also hosts a sports talk show on WMBS-AM radio from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.