Landmark Leopards: Belle Vernon football dynasty started in 1978
Submitted photo
Belle Vernon Area’s football team golf outing poster shows the way they were in 1978. From left are Jimmy Schivley, Bill Contz, Danny Wassilchalk and coach Jeff Petrucci.
Submitted photo
Four members of Belle Vernon Area’s 1978 football team are shown as a foursome during the 6th Annual Belle Vernon football golf outing at Cedarbrook Golf Course on June 18. From left are coach Jeff Petrucci, Bill Contz, Jim Schivley and Dan Wassilchalk.
Memories flowed like fine wine at the 6th Annual Belle Vernon football golf outing at Cedarbrook Golf Course on June 18. Special recognition was given to the 1978 Leopards who started Belle Vernon’s mid-Mon Valley grid dynasty with the first of three consecutive conference titles.
Three of the 1978 BVA Football Hall of Fame players , offensive/defensive tackle Bill Contz, halfback Jim Schivley, and quarterback Dan Wassilchalk, competed as a foursome with their coach Jeff Petrucci at the outing.
The 1978 Leopards ran the table with a 10-0 regular season to capture the AAA Big Ten Conference championship, the first conference title in Belle Vernon Area history. They finished with a 11-1 record, defeating Jeannette in the WPIAL playoffs 15-14 and losing in the WPIAL semifinals to Blackhawk, 13-7. It was Petrucci’s fourth year at the helm at Belle Vernon after coming over from Ringgold.
The golf outing brought back great memories for the 1978 foursome.
“It’s been a great day,” Petrucci stated. “Great day!”
“This is a thrill for me,” Contz offered. “I haven’t seen Jimmy Schivley in 42 years. I saw Wassilchalk occasionally, touched base with coach Petrucci every so often, but it is a privilege to be here. I will certainly come back if they invite me, but I’m having a great time.”
“This has been an amazing trip I flew up from Orlando,” Schivley said. “I’ve been in contact with Contz over the years and a couple of other guys through the internet. But I haven’t seen Contz or coach Petrucci for over 42 years. I was 18 the last time I saw these guys. It a whole lifetime of experiences and you come together and you remember everything.”
Wassilchalk was choked up about seeing his coach and teammates.
“There is an allegiance and a loyalty that I believe coach Petrucci instilled in us when he told us be as good as you can be,” Wasslichalk said. “Eventually all of us would take a piece of white tape and put it across our locker, ‘Be as good as you can be,’ and when you would walk through that locker room and you would see everybody believe that, and then win after win after win, we truly believed in one another and we trusted our coaches.
“That I believe still exists today. We stay in touch with one another, we confide in one another and I cannot tell you what a blessing it is to be here this day and shake hands with the man that I believe turned us into young men. These are life lessons.”
The seeds for the conference title in 1978 and the championships in 1979 and 1980 were planted in 1976, according to the former Leopards.
“In 1975 I didn’t know how to coach football,” Petrucci offered. “I got here and it wasn’t two or three weeks before the season started. I didn’t know the coaches, didn’t know the kids and, quite frankly, I wasn’t ready to be a head coach.
“But as the off season took place and a few kids started to come and they started to believe and as time went on the 1976 team went 8-2 and we shut out a bunch of people and they played so hard and they set the tempo. The 1975 team was a good football team, but we just weren’t together long enough to have that bond, but we bonded for the 1976 team and they set the tempo. They had a tradition and the kids after them wanted to be like them and once you get that going that’s a great thing.”
“We had a lot of hard workers,” Contz stated. “We had a lot of guys that weren’t necessarily short on talent, but they were long on desire, determination and our sophomore year Coach Petrucci’s squad finished 8-2, narrowly missed the conference title, so we kind of had a blueprint to follow, how hard those guys worked, how dedicated you had to be, and it didn’t hurt to have a guy like Marlon McIntyre as a sophomore and we had some guys with a lot of playing experience, but, more importantly, grit, determination and a willingness to work really hard to accomplish our goals.”
“I believe there are three ingredients aside from the players,” Wassilchalk said. “One, the community here was special. Number two, the coaches were outstanding and smart. The third, I have to say in all sincerity the best team was the team two years prior to us. We were sophomores and they set the tone. That 1976 team, I am extremely indebted to the work ethic of that team who worked together. They without a doubt physically abused the sophomores, but it turned us into harder working individuals. I believe that team started it. They taught us how to win.”
The 1978 Leopards recorded five shutouts, including four in a row to close the regular season.
“We wore shirts called Leopard Pride and we would work out and coach Petrucci made it a very difficult training camp, but he did it for a reason and a combination of factors helped us to be able to become Belle Vernon’s first conference champion,” Contz said.
“He assembled a staff of coaches that were teachers. Dave Simon, who played at Penn State, Chuck Machesky, Gene Belczyk was on that staff. There were guys that had a great deal of knowledge to share with us, teaching the proper technique and instilling pride. I keep going to that, pride was a big deal back in the day. But by that time coach Petrucci had established himself as a coach to be reckoned with. The players were buying into the program.”
“They learned to pay the price in the offseason,” Petrucci opined. “We worked so hard from January to August with conditioning and strength training and camaraderie. Belle Vernon was a big school district geographically so the offseason program was a way all these kids could stay together and they built a bond and when you build the bond you are a winner.”
All these years later falling short in the playoffs, the 13-7 loss on a cold rainy night to Blackhawk is still a bittersweet memory.
“We were 10-0 that season,” Schivley said. “We won the quarterfinal game and then lost in the semifinals to Blackhawk. I remember playing Jeannette and we won and against Blackhawk was the first time I had ever ran on AstroTurf. It did effect me a little bit, I had to change shoes and I was a running back and I ran the ball a lot and I remember trying to adjust to the AstroTurf. To this day we think about how close we were.”
“When I think about it, and Petrucci has said it, and this is coming from the quarterback, offense wins fans and defense wins games. I believe that,” Wassilchalk explained. “Defense pulled us out of the Jeannette game and I wish the weather was better at Mt. Lebanon on that field the night against Blackhawk. We could always wish for various things and conditions in life, but we learn adversity and if there is one thing that I truly remember about that locker room after the Blackhawk game it was we stay together and we have done that all these years.”
“We ran the table in the conference,” Contz said. “It was with a defense I believe that only surrendered three touchdowns, we actually gave up a total of 22 points the entire regular season. We get to the playoffs and it’s a whole other animal, you got another conference champ, this time Jeannette with a kid named Adam Bostick, a great multi-sport athlete, and a lot of tough kids and we were up 15-0, but all of the sudden they have momentum. We are encountering this for the first time and they put 14 on the board and it’s a narrow one-point victory.
“The following week we’re scheduled to play Blackhawk from another conference, we are playing at Mt. Lebanon on AstroTurf and I remember it being a rainy, cold night and they jumped out ahead of us and we just didn’t have enough at the end to come back. We fell one game short of playing for the Triple-A title. At the time it was like Star Trek, we had gone where no other team had gone before.”
Belle Vernon didn’t lose a conference game in three years. In 1978, 1979 and 1980 the Leopards were 25-0-1 in conference play with three straight WPIAL playoff appearances.
Petrucci looks back on the run of conference titles with a great deal of pride.
“Once we got it rolling we all believed,” Petrucci stated. “We worked hard, we had great kids with really good football coaches that cared about their kids and it was just a real big family atmosphere.”
George Von Benko’s “Memory Lane” column appears 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.