You know me, Steve, I was an intense puppy.”
Meet Bob Koch. Centaur co-captain. Class of 1969. Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales.
This CENTAUR SEASONS encompasses the A.C. graduating years ’69 through ’74. Six years of schooling, seven years of seasoning.
For reasons I’ll speak of in future posts, these years constitute the college’s first real, tangible, identifiable “era.” We share much in common, we of those classes, and I think we can all take credit for getting A.C. off the ground, into the air, on its way.
But as I have posted before, that class of ’69 remains first among equals.
And for my money, of those few Original Centaurs, Bob Koch remains first among that not-so-many.
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“The First Among Us” here on HoopsU.com appeared originally on CENTAUR SEASONS, a “memory blog” of the basketball beginnings of the half-good, half-bad, all-new Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs in Center Valley, Pa. Steve played on four of the school’s first seven teams, was MVP senior year and in 1974 graduated in the sixth class.
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Bob was A.C.’s first Intramural Athlete of the Year, in ’65-’66, when intramurals was the only game in town. Four years later he was the first Intercollegiate Athlete of the Year.
I met Bob when I was a freshman, his years in Center Valley gone but not forgotten, the stories about him legion. He came to the campus a couple of times my first year, and when there he’d run with the team, work up a sweat, throw some elbows, take no quarter, look right through you with those hawk-like eyes. I was terrified of him. He was in fabulous shape still, fabulously intense.
How intense? “He was everything you could imagine,” says Tony Mazzeo, a freshman when Bob was a senior. Coming from Maz, the spiritual descendant of Bob Koch the Intense, that’s saying something.
Bob was part of the starting five on that first team. Though not because he was starting-five good. No, Maz says. Koch willed himself onto the floor: “He was No. 1 in hustle, determination, balls, leadership, everything else. That was him. He had a lot of scraped knees, black eyes from bangin’, whatever it took. You know how they say the Phillies don’t have anyone to grab players by the neck and get them going? That was Koch.”
He was, in other words, PRECISELY what the Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales Centaurs needed to get a basketball program going, to carry the load beneath the burden of some tremendous trouncings, a couple of colossal crushings.
He continued to grab players even when he was gone.
Chris Cashman arrived the year after Bob. He was on a bus to an away game when Maz stood up and gave the team some what-for of his own.
Maz really got into it, Cash says, talking about how the team was playing like a bunch of girls, afraid of themselves, each other, afraid to get after it. Though maybe not so politely stated.
“This went on and on,” Cash remembers, “and then Maz says, ‘Bob Koch would never have let this happen!’ It was Bob Koch THIS! And Bob Koch THAT! And then Maz, he says something like, ‘NOW LET’S PLAY TONIGHT!’ I remember the bus was dark, and Maz standing in the aisle by the seat behind me. And I’m thinking, I don’t know Bob Koch. I wouldn’t recognize Bob Koch. But it sounds to me like I sure better start playing like Bob Koch.”
It is, I know, too much a stretch to say that forty-some years later the DeSales University Bulldogs, the erstwhile A.C. Centaurs, still play like Bob Koch. But it’s a wonderful thought. And they should.
Koch’s Centaur team his senior season finished 3 and 14.
But, please, please, please, don’t miss the point here.
“That does not diminish what we brought to the table,” Bob says of that first collegiate team, adamant still. “It was NOT a joke. There is no question about that. We took it very seriously. All of us. The attitude was we expected to win. We were all focused on being successful. We didn’t have much of it, but it was very important to us. It wasn’t just fun and games; it wasn’t just an intramural program.”
Coming out of Father Judge High School in Philly, Bob had been accepted at LaSalle and St. Joe’s. Philly Catholic colleges, Bob says, a logical next step for a working-class Philly Catholic kid just like him. But Judge was an Oblate school, and the priests there had been talking up this new place getting going somewhere up near Allentown.
They had him at “new,” he says, and he knew it even then.
“I liked the idea of being both the freshman and senior class wrapped into one,” Bob says. “I thought that could be something pretty special. Start now, and actually set the path for everybody else.”
He set the path – and then stayed on it.
Bob Koch spent 42 years coaching girls basketball at a handful of high schools in southeastern Pennsylvania.
(We pause to imagine what it must have been like for these girls when they got their first dose of Coach Koch!)
He took each of his teams to at least one league title. There were some state championship runs. Two undefeated seasons. He was a nine-time coach of the year; in 1995 he was a Converse National High School Coach of the Year Runner-Up.
These days he operates the Bob Koch Point/Shooting Guard Academy for high school girls. Fittingly, these hoops camps use the DeSales University facilities.
Set the path, stay on it.
“I am a product of what I experienced at DeSales,” he says.
I ask him for an example. He is quick with an answer. As a Centaur during that first season, in ’68-’69, he says, he was on the wrong end of a “thumping” more than once. That team lost games by – geez! — 21, 41, 22, 26 and … 70.
As a player, he says, he wanted to forget.
As a coach, he says, he knew he couldn’t.
“Steve, I had some teams that were very, very good,” Bob says of his girls teams. “We could have really hammered some teams. But somewhere along the line you just remember that you didn’t appreciate it as a player and you wonder what it accomplished. I never did it.
“Today’s values are very different,” he goes on. “I’m not a product of that.”
No, he’s not. He’s a product of Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales.
Which no longer exists.
TO GO DIRECTLY TO THE WEBSITE CENTAUR SEASONS, CLICK HERE
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.
- CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes … - September 18, 2013
- CENTAUR (OFF) SEASONS: A dozen ways to read the 97 posts in the scorebook thus far — until a new roster begins taking the floor in the fall - June 13, 2013
- CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game - May 14, 2013
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