Aug 28, 2003 By Rob Burchianti 4 min read

When John Fortugna took over a struggling and disappointing Uniontown football program in 1995, he faced what many saw as a mountainous challenge. Nine years later Fortugna is at the helm of a Red Raider machine that has churned out three consecutive playoff berths, as well as one undefeated regular season and one Keystone Conference title.

And he’s smiling at the prospects of his team attaining an even higher level.

“The kids are positive now,” Fortugna said. “They expect to go (to the playoffs). They work toward that.”

The postseason is the only blemish on what has been a solid run by the Red Raiders. Uniontown has fallen in the first round all three years.

There was a time not long ago, however, when just participating in the postseason seemed like a hopeless dream.

Uniontown was 0-10 that first season under Fortugna, then 2-8 in 1998, breaking a winless streak that stretched back into 1993.

The Red Raiders showed a brief glimpse of what was to come by fashioning a 5-5 record in 1997, snapping a string of losing campaigns that spanned back into the 1980’s. Uniontown wasn’t eliminated from the playoff hunt until the last week of the regular season.

Unfortunately, the team took another step back in 1998, going winless for the third time in five years and second time under Fortugna.

But at what would seem to be a time of frustration and despair, Fortugna never wavered.

The team hung in a lot of games, he insisted. It had talent coming back, he pointed out.

No one could be blamed if they felt Fortugna’s optimism was foolish and unrealistic at the time.

As it turned out, though, the program has taken off since that exasperating season. The millennium apparently marked a new birth for the Red Raiders.

Uniontown went 5-4 in the regular season and 3-3 in the Keystone to qualify for the WPIAL playoffs in 2000.

In 2001, the Red Raiders pummeled a Thomas Jefferson team that had hammered them in the postseason the previous year, and went on to post a perfect 9-0 regular season, including a 5-0 mark in winning the Keystone crown. The solid year earned them the top seed in the WPIAL Class AAA playoffs, although they lost to an under-rated Highlands squad in the first round.

Last year Fortugna’s crew was 6-3 in the regular season and 4-2 in finishing second in the Keystone.

In the last three years combined, Uniontown is 20-7 in the regular season, 12-5 in the Keystone and 0-3 in the playoffs.

Fortugna’s overall winning percentage was .180 (9-41) in his first five years, but is .667 (20-10) since then.

Fortugna refuses to take a huge portion of the credit for the Red Raiders’ rise, though.

“I’ve got to thank the players, the parents, the administrators and the coaching staff for helping all this come about,” Fortugna said.

“I’ll tell you what makes a good head football coach – assistant coaches, and I have great assistant coaches. They’re here in the offseason. They spend a lot of time with the players and a lot of time with me. They put in a lot of hours.

“The board members and the administrators were behind improving the football field,” Fortugna added as he stood on the field of Bill Power Stadium, with its highly regarded artificial sprint grass. “You can see what happens when you have a nice facility. Making those improvements helped the whole system out. It helped peak interest even more. Fan support has picked up, too.

“Our roster is much bigger now then when I started. The kids want to be part of this, part of the winning we have here now.

“They want to come out and be part of that tradition we’re building.”

Even if he doesn’t want to admit it, it’s a football tradition that has been reborn at Uniontown, thanks to the nurturing, patience and optimism of Fortugna.