Lasting Legacy
June 28, 2004 10:34 PM | General
June 28, 2004
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Stan Romanoski knew all about improvising as West Virginia University’s track and field coach from 1957-81. He had to because there was simply not enough money for him to do otherwise.
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| Stan Romanoski poses with his bust at the WVU Sports Hall of Fame induction cermonies in 1997. (WVU Sports Communications) |
In the winter when his teams trained for indoor track season they either toughed it out on the 1/5th-mile outdoor cinder track that encircled old Mountaineer Field. Or when the weather was just too bad he took the boys inside and they ran down a 200-yard stretch of concrete floor underneath the seats of the stadium.
“The big problem was depending upon which direction you ran after about 100 yards you either had to go uphill or downhill,” said cross country All-American Carl Hatfield, whom Romanoski fondly referred to as his ‘diamond in the rough’ when Hatfield was a freshman in 1965. “This was concrete – not soft asphalt. It’s a wonder we never got injured.”
Romanoski also had the athletic department buy his team long sheets of plywood to place down on the track so his team could run over the snow and mud. And when the snow covered the plywood he handed out brooms and shovels and told his athletes to get to work.
“That’s your warm-up,” he said.
Always looking for small ways to improve his program, Romanoski found an even better venue for his team to train when the MountainLair parking garage was built in the late 1960s.
“When the professors left around 4 o’clock we would jog over from the stadium and get a workout inside the parking garage,” said Hatfield. “We could run in a flat circle and we didn’t have to watch out for the traffic because it was gone by 4.”
Stan Romanoski died last Saturday morning at his home in Morgantown at 85 after a brief illness. His 24 years spent at WVU has left a lasting impression on those fortunate enough to know him.
Romanoski, of Lithuanian descent, grew up in Wheeling with his mother; his father died at a young age. Longtime friend Sam Pinion, also a Wheeling native and one of the stars on West Virginia’s 1937 Sun Bowl team, says Romanoski used to run from his home to Triadelphia High School every day and that’s how he got interested in track.
Romanoski played football, basketball and track in high school and was a two-time state champion in the 880-yard run. After attending Belmont (Ohio) College for a year, he enrolled at WVU where he was a member of the mile relay team that finished fourth at Penn Relays, setting a school record that lasted until 1964.
After graduating from WVU in 1942, Romanoski took the head coaching position at Anstead High School (now Midland Trail) but left school after just six months to enlist in the Navy during World War II. At the completion of the war, Romanoski returned to Anstead where he coached football, basketball and established the school’s first track program.
From there he moved to Dunbar High School near Charleston where he also served as athletic director and coached the football, basketball and track teams. He led Dunbar to a 9-0 record in football in 1956 and won the state track championship in 1957 before replacing longtime track coach Art Smith at his alma mater.
By 1962, his cross country team claimed the first of three Southern Conference titles and his track team took the 1964 Southern Conference crown. Martin Pushkin, who ran for Romanoski in the early 1960s and later followed him as the school’s track and cross country coach, says a lack of resources made Romanoski’s job a difficult one.
“Back in those days there were no assistants,” said Pushkin. “You just did it all yourself and did the best that you could. You wrote up the workouts and put them up on the wall and then you tried to move around from group to group to cover everybody when you were out there. Sometimes you did and sometimes you didn’t.”
Pushkin came to school as a walk-on like many of the athletes Romanoski coached at WVU.
“I was down at the old Field House one afternoon shortly after I got back from the service,” Pushkin remembered. “There was an old football coach by the name of Russ Crane who was volunteering for the track team and was working with the throwers. I asked him if I could try and I ended up throwing it further than his guys and he said, ‘Why don’t you come out for the team?’ Then I met Coach Romanoski and he remembered me from high school and that’s how I made the team.”
Without question Romanoski’s best walk-on was Matewan’s Carl Hatfield, who didn’t even know what cross country was when he arrived on campus in 1965.
“My senior year they started a track team in high school and I ran that one season,” Hatfield laughed. “I got in shape by bicycle riding.”
But Romanoski saw a distance running star in Hatfield and soon began politicking to get him in the nation’s best races. Romanoski had a national caliber pole vaulter in Jack Carter, who cleared 15-feet-8-inches at the NCAA meet his junior year in 1966 to earn All-America honors. Romanoski was getting invitations for Carter to appear at all of the nation’s top meets and would only send him if Hatfield was included.
“He would send in the invitation for Carter provided they would take me as a filler in the two-mile run,” said Hatfield.
Mike Mosser, the school’s first national champion in 1972 and perhaps Romanoski’s most decorated runner, says that was typical of the way he operated.
“Coach gave you the opportunity to get into these big meets,” said Mosser. “When I was in school we traveled to meets in these old Dodge station wagons and although you were only allowed to put six people in them we’d pile eight and 10 guys in there because he wanted to get as many people as he could to the meets.”
Mosser says many times Romanoski was forced to take his thriftiness to extremes. “We’d go to Philadelphia and stay in YMCAs so we didn’t have to pay for lodging. When we’d go to VMI we stayed in the barracks there. He got as much exposure on as little budget as you could get.”
Hatfield remembers the first two times he qualified for nationals he was sent to the race by himself. “Coach would take care of all of the arrangements with the Navy coach and I would meet him and his team at the airport when I arrived,” said Hatfield. “The athletic department couldn’t afford to pay for both of us to go so that’s how I traveled. It wasn’t until my senior year that he was able to travel with me to nationals.”
Mosser admitted that by the early 1970s Romanoski was getting increasingly frustrated with the penny pinching. “Coach Romo would just nip at the administration’s heels when he didn’t get another scholarship or something like that,” he said. “He was always biting at (Athletic Director) Red Brown’s heels.”
In order to field a complete roster Romanoski also unabashedly recruited football players from Jim Carlen and Bobby Bowden’s teams.
“He had Jimmy Braxton, Artie Owens, Danny Buggs, Harry Blake, Kerry Marbury, and Garnett Edwards. He talked them into coming out for the team to better their sprinting skills,” said Mosser.
In fact, Romanoski had no idea Buggs was on campus when he found out about him running unattached at an indoor meet at Pitt to stay in shape for football. A couple of coaching colleagues came up to Romanoski after Buggs won his heat of the 100-yard dash and commented on what a fabulous runner he had.
“I had absolutely no idea whatsoever who he was,” Romanoski recalled a few years ago. “Here he was on campus for more than a year and this was how I found out about him.”
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| Romanoski led WVU to three Southern Conference cross country titles and one track title in 1964. (WVU Sports Communications) |
Buggs teamed with Mosser, Harry “Snake” Blake and Tim Kelley to make up the school’s fantastic sprint medley relay team that won Penn Relays and set a meet record that still exists today. Mosser ran the 880 leg of the race.
“Danny and Tim ran the 220 leg, Snake ran the 440 and I was the anchor,” said Mosser. “I was talking to Snake about it the other day and he told me he still has the watch and the gold medal from that race.”
According to Mosser, Romanoski’s list of standout athletes encompassed the entire roster. “He had people who succeeded in all facets of track,” he said. “Garnett Edwards was an All-American hurdler, Jack Carter was an All-American in the pole vault, Carl Hatfield, Alex Kasich and Don Sauer were All-American distance runners and I was an All-American in the middle distance.”
And while Hatfield later won an AAU national title in 1978 and was a nationally known road racer, Mosser’s WVU accomplishments were unparalleled until James Jett came on the scene in the early 1990s.
Mosser captured the indoor 1,000-yard run at Cobo Arena in Detroit in 1972 and ran in the famous Martin Luther King “Dream Mile” that featured the return of Olympian Jim Ryun to take on the world’s No. 1 ranked runner Marty Liquori.
“It was the top race of the year and it was nationally televised,” said Mosser. “Marty won the race but I led through the half mile and everybody was trying to figure out how this West Virginia hillbilly got into the race. It was Coach Romanoski. He lobbied and coerced and who knows what else to get me into the race, which turned out to be another stepping stone for me.”
Mosser spent three seasons on the ITA professional tour before it folded.
Hatfield believes Romanoski’s greatest legacy was his driving force in helping establish cross country in high schools throughout West Virginia. If you ran high school cross country in the Mountain State in the last 30 years you probably have Stan Romanoski to thank.
“He promoted the sport and he encouraged coaches from around the state to have cross country teams,” Hatfield remembered. “He had what was called the West Virginia University Invitational in September and originally when he started it there were mostly Pennsylvania schools in it. Then West Virginia schools started having cross country and it grew by leaps and bounds.”
“You can compare Coach Romanoski 30 years ago to what Craig Turnbull has done in this state for wrestling or what Nikki Izzo-Brown is doing for girl’s soccer,” said Mosser. “When he brought the meets here he would have us mingle with the kids and I’d say a great majority of the good West Virginia runners wound up coming here afterward.”
Despite all of his accomplishments, Romanoski was never able to get the university support he felt his program and athletes deserved. To help compensate for the disappointment he took up golf and soon became a scratch golfer.
Everyone who knows Stan has a golfing story.
“The year he went with me to nationals in Tennessee he took his golf clubs with him,” laughed Hatfield. “We arrived on a Wednesday and he gave me some money and wrote out my workout for the day and told me he’d see me later in the evening. He was out getting a round of golf in.”
Hatfield’s personal favorite golf story revolves around Romanoski’s cross country workouts. The coach had the team dress at old Mountaineer Field and for a warm-up he instructed them to make the three-mile run directly up Falling Run Road to Morgantown’s old country club where the football field is today.
“There was one tee that is actually just about where the press box is now and there was also a green near there,” said Hatfield. “When we came out through the bushes to meet him at the golf course he was waiting for us with irons and a putter in hand. He would give us a workout and we would always start and finish at the one green.”
“When we got there he seldom had his stopwatch out or gave us our times,” laughed Mosser. “He was too busy putting and chipping on the green.”
“He’d say, ‘I want you boys to run 880 yards and go around the number nine green – stay off the green – and finish right here.’ No matter what, he always told us to stay off the green,” said Hatfield.
“Even up to this year he was still playing golf and shooting his age,” said Mosser. “He said he wanted to shoot his age this year."
Romanoski didn't smoke or drink and kept himself in remarkable shape. Even at 85, his death came as a shock to those who were close to him.
Romanoski and his late wife Hildred were particularly close to former WVU football coach Gene Corum and his wife Lucille. The Romanoskis were also frequent dinner guests of the Pinions.
“Stan and his wife just got along wonderfully with everybody,” said Pinion.
“Stan was a real good guy; he was just a down-to-earth kind of guy,” said friend and longtime West Virginia sports writer Mickey Furfari.
“He was very fair,” added Martin Pushkin. “He was not a complicated kind of guy. He was a lot like that old saying ‘what you see is what you get.’”
“The people who flourished for him weren’t necessarily nationally ranked when they came here,” said Mosser. “He developed a work ethic and a technique and we took it from there. He wasn’t going to baby sit us and yet he wasn't going to let us think that our talent was going to override practice and hard work.”
“He was like a father figure to me,” said Hatfield. “He was just a wonderful person.”
Romanoski is survived by three sons – Charles, Stanley and Thomas as well as several grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.
