CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes …

WELCOME TO A SPECIAL EDITION OF CENTAUR SEASONS HERE ON HOOPSU.COM. CENTAUR SEASONS IS CURRENTLY IN OFF-SEASON MODE, WITH PLANS TO TIP OFF A NEW BLOGGING YEAR AROUND THANSKGIVING. BUT A RECENT ANNOUNCEMENT AT ‘ALLENTOWN COLLEGE OF ST. FRANCIS DESALES UNIVERSITY’ IN CENTER VALLEY, PA, WARRANTS THIS HOOPSU.COM BREAK-IN BULLETIN.

Posted September 18

Geez, what a big deal it was! College students return every fall to old friends, old haunts, new classes — and a new football season. So it was at little Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales, even if the school had no, you know, real team.

Because there was always flag football! The A.F.F.L.! The Allentown Flag Football League! Enter at your own risk.

When you have nearly nothing, any little something matters*. Too much, perhaps. But such was life in Center Valley in the getting-started ’70s. Maybe 400 students; a handful of buildings. OF COURSE flag football mattered too much. We’re all back at school and now what to do? Nothing, or: Play flag football; or: Watch flag football; or: Talk talk talk flag football.

Here is the best part. It was a do-it-yourself league at a do-it-yourself school.

“We had to organize everything ourselves,” Jerry Wilkinson remembered last year. “Coach gave us the footballs and the flags” — that’s Coach John Compardo, our all-things-to-all-people Athletic Director — “the rest of it? We organized the referees, we organized the rules, we organized the games, we organized all of it.”

Wilk speaks with authority. His junior year he was the commissioner of the A.F.F.L. and senior year the president of the Intramural Committee.

On Friday September 27 Jerry Wilkinson is to be inducted into the college’s Sports Hall of Fame. My sophomore year seniors Wilk and Tony Mazzeo, Wilk’s roommate, co-captained the Centaurs to an unheard-of 8-and-8 half-good season, a non-losing campaign.

Indeed, ’twas Maz who emailed the word around: “Pleased to say that Wilkie has been selected for induction to the Hall of Fame. The Veterans Committee has selected a pioneer from the early years for his varsity contributions.”

That our Centaur Seasons are overseen by a “Veterans Committee” took a bit of swallowing, but “pioneer status” has a terrific ring about it.

Wilk was the soccer goalie and a two-year starter in hoops. During that 8-and-8 season, with Wilk and Maz leading the way, we scored the biggest wins in the school’s brief history.

There was a 63-61 last-second stunner over Philadelphia Pharmacy. “A meaningful game and we all knew it,” Wilk said, “they were an established program and known in Philadelphia.”

There was also a pair of wins over the Spartans of York College of Pennsylvania, which when Wilk and Maz were freshman had humiliated Allentown twice — once by 70 points. “Our biggest wins,” Wilk says. “We beat a team that had killed us in the past.”

Wilk and Maz’s most-lasting contribution, though, is likely this: In May of their senior year Allentown “qualified as one of the latest members” in the NCAA, according to the Minstrel, the school’s newspaper. “I think what we did in those early years,” Wilk said, spreading the credit to all the players in those first half-dozen Centaur Seasons, “was establish a program that was good enough for other people to want to come to the school. At least that’s the way I look at it. And I make no pretense that what we did out there really looked very good!”

Still, there is no 8-and-8 without Wilk and Maz, Maz and Wilk. Maz — he of the multiple sport letters and his senior year the Athlete of the Year and MVP of soccer, baseball and basketball (shared with Wilk) — was long ago inducted into the Hall. That Wilk is there with him now is simply perfect.

So too, this: The rest of Maz’s email said Wilk was being recognized also for “his work in organizing and helping to structure the Intramural program.”

Have I mentioned yet the role flag football played in the lifeblood of Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales, at this school in the cornfields with nothing to do unless we did it ourselves?

Within days of our return in September, teams were formed. “C.R.A.B.S.,” “Mack’s Pizza,” “Wagasa,” “NADS” are a few I can remember. One year the C.R.A.B. Dave Gleilmi jumped at a Wagasa offer to quarterback its squad. Oh, the controversy! So then the C.R.A.B.S. turned to Jerry Finiello, a theater and speech major for crying out loud. At A.C., jock-like C.R.A.B.S. and emotive T&Sers rarely intermingled. But that was the beauty of a place so small, so hermetically sealed: Everyone really did know everyone else, and we really were all in this together. Besides, Finiello could zip the ball.

The A.F.F.L. usually sported eight teams, 11 on a team, nine on the field. That’s nearly a quarter of the school’s enrollment. Practices took place on the quads, classes cut. (Priorities!) Sheets of plays were mimeographed and zealously guarded. Skull sessions were held in dorm rooms, training table meals (seriously) in the cafeteria. Exhibition matches were arranged and then the season kicked-off, anticipation finally exploded.

It was a blood-sport game, the rivalries intense, the injuries many. (Here’s no surprise: I spectated only.) The ER at Sacred Heart Hospital was well stocked with AC footballers. Wayne Rizzo blew out a knee and wound up in an ankle-to-hip cast. His was not the only cartilage sacrificed. I remember one guy my freshman year, 1969, playing with an over-the-top abandon, hoping to break an arm or leg as a way to maybe keep him from the Vietnam war that loomed upon graduation.

Oh, my, but it mattered.

Wilk quarterbacked the C.R.A.B.S., the team everyone loved to hate, for the obvious reason that they were the best team. (One year the C.R.A.B.S. even sponsored a JV team, the NADS. “Go, NADS! — get it?) Wilk — 5-foot-11, square shouldered, rock solid — commanded the field and threw the ball with the same authority with which he served as league commissioner and intramurals president, making schedules, settling disputes, sometimes laying the lines before games.

I can remember my first time watching Wilk calling plays, running the offense — and being stunned to learn that he hadn’t played in high school. His passes were frozen ropes, and he could unleash it when called for. I went to a small school in south central Pennsylvania and for sure he would’ve played there. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought that.

“I’d be playing intramurals and guys would come up to me and say, ‘Where’d you play high school football?'” Wilk told me last year. “But I didn’t play in high school. My high school had thousands of kids. I’m athletic enough to look mediocre at anything I play. But I don’t kid myself and think I could have walked over to Lehigh and played quarterback. I was pretty good at Allentown College flag football. I didn’t worry about the rest of it.”

Lehigh University is in Bethlehem, over the mountain, and Wilk is right about that. The rest of it, not so much.

Admittedly, it is impossible for college-sports types these days to grasp the concept that intramurals should count too in a hall-of-fame consideration. But to us “veterans,” we “pioneers” of Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales, this is all purely logical and totally deserving. It is also no apology.

Today’s full-blown DeSales University Bulldog D-III athletic program can draw a straight line as crisp as a Jerry Wilkinson pass back to 1965, when the first 156 guys showed up and played intramural flag football and wrestled and boxed in the school’s basement. The first “varsity” basketball team played in the Allentown Industrial League (losing the championship by one point, says one recollector). And for gym class Coach Compardo would sometimes line his guys up and have them pick up the rocks on the athletic field. Somebody had to, and it had to start somewhere.

Wilk’s hand in this evolving story was to play goalie on the soccer team, get the Centaurs to 8-and-8, organize a flag football league that maybe shouldn’t have been quite so life and death. And throw the 45-yarder down the sideline as needed.

“Our intramurals were very, very competitive,” Wilk said. “Remember: Coach Compardo was very, very competitive.”

Just a few years before, still at Allentown Central Catholic, Compardo had coached the basketball team to a state championship. Yet here he was now, at Allentown College.

“You have to give him the credit — for instilling that spirit in people,” Wilk said. “He was the guy: You gave everything you could in everything you did, regardless of how good you were.”

Graduation from college Wilk enlisted in the Navy — a perfect fit — Aviation Officer Candidate School. Here’s the thing about that, Wilk said, “and I’m not bragging”: What he learned on the playing fields of Center Valley applied directly in his new life. “I was the regimental commander for my team. I organized the flag-football team and was the quarterback. That’s exactly what I did with the C.R.A.B.S. The experience we got from organizing it, that was the important part.”

Here’s to the DeSales University Sports Hall of Fame for recognizing it.

* * * * * * *

Other members of the DeSales University Sports Hall of Fame who with Wilk and Maz represent the earliest era of Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs: Bob Koch, from the first graduating class in 1969; Dennis Ramella, the basketball team’s first 1,000-point man; Tom Shirley (basketball and later the A.D. and women’s hoops coach); the 1971 baseball team (at 7-4, the first team to post a winning record); Vince Yost (golf and baseball); John Weiland (soccer, golf and baseball); and Coach John Compardo and Fr. Daniel Gambet OSFS (for a time in those years the Academic Dean)

*When you have nearly nothing, any little something matters. Mike “Turtle” Dowd, a Centaur on the first two varsity teams, 1969 & 70, emailed me that sentiment in response to a CENTAUR SEASONS post last year. There’ll be more from Turtle (yes, he’s still called Turtle) in the future.

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Steve McKee

Steve McKee is the author of CENTAUR SEASONS, a memory blog about his basketball-playing days at Allentown (Pa.) College of St. Francis de Sales in the early 1970s (a good excuse for using his college yearbook picture -- though there's NO excuse for that mustache and hair!).

CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.

Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.

He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).

For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.