Red Raiders’ record broken by OLSH
Submitted photo
Uniontown assistant coach John Kruper (left front) and head coach Abe Everhart (right front) celebrate with the players after the Red Raiders won the 1964 PIAA championship.
Submitted photo
Uniontown basketball coach Abe Everhart draws up a play as (kneeling, from left) Stu Lantz, Ray Parson, Pat Yates, (standing, from left) Ben Gregory and Jim Rae look on during the Red Raiders’ 1964 PIAA championship season.
A longstanding WPIAL record was broken recently by the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart boys basketball team.
On Jan. 28, the Chargers’ 82-46 victory on the road over South Side secured OLSH its own spot in the record books, marking the program’s 53rd straight win — the most wins in a row any WPIAL basketball team has strung together in the league’s 100-plus year history.
The old record of 52 consecutive wins was set by Uniontown from 1963-65 and tied by Washington from 1983-85.
“We were responsible for 28 of those 52 wins,” former Uniontown star Stu Lantz recalled. “Anytime there is a record on the books for that amount of time you are surprised because all records they come and they go, but it was a nice little run for that. I’m sure somewhere down the line some school is going to take it a little bit further. Records are made to be broken.”
Ray Parson agreed.
“Records are made to be broken,” said Parson, a starter on the Uniontown teams who went on to play football at the University of Minnesota and then in the NFL.
Parson, 74, now lives in Eden Prairie, Minn., and told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette he knew the record would be broken at some point.
“I knew one day someone would come along, have a great, great team and probably duplicate what we did. And go beyond,” Parson said. “I’m not upset. That record stood for quite a while. I wish the best for (OLSH). In a way, I’m sorry they broke our record, but more power to them.”
Lantz who is 75 years old and is in his 35th year as Los Angeles Lakers TV analyst remembers how good his Red Raiders were back in the day.
Uniontown had two future NFL players in the starting five, another future NFL player on the bench and also a star player who spent seven seasons in the NBA, once averaging 20 points a game. The Uniontown team of 1963-64 was loaded. That team started the 52-game winning streak and finished that season with a 28-0 record. The Raiders won WPIAL and PIAA titles.
Uniontown, coached by the legendary Abe Everhart, averaged 82 points a game during the 1963-1964 regular season.
“Even though I played in the pros and against pros, I would still put some of those Uniontown games and some of those times ahead of my professional games,” Parson told the Post-Gazette. “Not because we won all of those games, but because of the camaraderie we had and the love we had for each other — and our coach. He turned us loose, but we didn’t run up the score on anyone.
“Most of our first-team players rarely played more than a quarter-and-a-half until the playoffs. That’s how great of a collection of players we had. I don’t think there will ever be anything like that again in Uniontown.”
“That was the thought process of Coach Everhart,” Lantz said. “He was such a great sportsman, he didn’t like to embarrass the opposition. He would only let us play generally the first and third quarter. We didn’t see a whole lot of time the entire season in the second and fourth quarter, we rarely ever played in the second and fourth until we got to the playoffs.”
Lantz, the cornerstone of that 1963-64 undefeated state championship team, became a star during his senior season with the Red Raiders. Lantz on the 1964 team averaged 18 points a game before going on to play at the University of Nebraska and averaged 20 for the NBA’s San Diego Rockets in the 1970-71 season.
“I got a little bit of confidence rolling during that summer after my junior year,” Lantz offered. “Again the playground did the job for me. I lived on that playground. I lived about a block away, so I was there from sun up to sun down. I was on the playground honing skills and getting a lot of experience under my belt and the maturity happened and we came back the next year.
“We told coach Everhart after we lost our junior year, which was an upset when we lost to John Naponick and Norwin. After that season ended my best friend Pope Gregory and I were out for track and we told Abe don’t worry we are going to win it next year and we went out and did it.”
Aliquippa ended Uniontown’s winning streak by defeating the Raiders in the 1965 WPIAL semifinals, 66-65. The 1964 team was led by Lantz and Parson, a 6-foot-4 sophomore who averaged seven points a game. The other future NFL player in the starting lineup was Gregory, a guard who averaged 13 points and went on to play running back at Nebraska and in the NFL with the Buffalo Bills.
The other two starters were 6-2 junior guard Pat Yates (11.2 ppg) and 5-11 senior guard Jim Rae. Gene Huey was a reserve who played a season in the NFL with the San Diego Chargers.
“Man, that was a collection of athletes we had back then,” Parson recalled. “I haven’t see a team yet that I would worry about if we were going ‘mano a mano’ against them. Physically, speed-wise, finesse-wise, we had it all.”
Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, a small Catholic school in Moon Township, has stretched the win streak to 60 and was scheduled to play a playoff game against Sto-Rox on Friday night in an attempt to get to 62. The Chargers have their eye on WPIAL and PIAA championships and tying the state record for consecutive victories (68) which belongs to the 1976-78 West Philadelphia High School basketball team. The 1976-77 team featured Gene Banks, who went on to be a standout at Duke and then played in the NBA.
OLSH coach Mike Rodriguez gave a tip of the cap to history as his team continues it’s record-breaking run.
“What a tremendous honor to be mentioned with the Uniontown teams and the Washington High teams,” Rodriguez told the Beaver County Times. “Those teams had NFL players and college basketball players. Just to be mentioned in the same breath as those teams is quite an honor.”
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.