Lyons Adds to Parkersburg's WVU Lore
January 06, 2015 09:48 AM | General
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| New West Virginia University Director of Athletics Shane Lyons, pictured with his wife Emily, daughter Brooke and son Cameron. |
| Submitted photo |
Looking at that TV tower was considered bad luck and meant a certain loss for the team. Well, we all looked at that tower and, yes, we always seemed to lose, especially to the Big Reds.
Come to think of it, just about everyone who traveled up or down Route 2 back in those days must have been looking at that big TV tower because nobody ever seemed to win in the City of Champions (In 2010, SportsCenter actually named Parkersburg a national runner-up following a two-year quest to locate TitleTown USA).
The big TV tower and those beatings we all absorbed from the Big Reds at Stadium Field and City Park were the two things that immediately came to mind when I learned that Parkersburg’s Shane Lyons was returning home to lead West Virginia University’s athletic department.
And then I began thinking of the enormous contributions Parkersburg athletes and administrators have made to the success of West Virginia University athletics through the years.
Some of the names are a veritable Who’s Who of Mountaineer sports.
Before the turn of the century there was Parkersburg's Henry Neely, a center on the 1895 WVU team, and then later Glenn Allen and Howard Henrie were important contributors on the Mountaineer gridiron in the early teens.
In the 1920s, there was punishing runner Pete Barnum, one of Coach Clarence “Doc” Spears’ best players during West Virginia’s first Golden Era of football (Barnum’s name is a clear omission from the WVU Sports Hall of Fame roster, by the way) and 1926 team captain and WVU Sports Hall of Fame member Ross McHenry.
Three-year letter winner Julian Murrin and two-time letterman Clarence Murrin were also key football contributors during that period.
Parkersburg two-way guard Walter Gordon was a team captain for the Mountaineers in 1930. End Bob Mellace arrived in Morgantown in the late 1930s and was a vital member of the WVU athletic program as a player and coach before becoming a noted Mountain State journalist at the Charleston Daily Mail, advancing all the way to associate editor and lead political writer in the early 1960s.
Parkersburg’s Clarence Cox was one of West Virginia’s best pass catchers on the 1948 team that defeated Texas Western in the Sun Bowl and then a year later in 1949 led the team in receiving.
Bob Fought, Harold McKibben, Jack Morton and Richard Pence were other 1940s-era Mountaineer players from Parkersburg.
More recently, there was Jim Bargeloh, Larry Tracewell and George Nedeff in the 1960s, Russ Schweiker, Harry Thornton and Rich Duggan in the 1970s, and hard-hitting defensive back Mike Scott, tight end Jeff Eddy and All-America offensive tackle Rick Phillips (a key member of West Virginia’s 1989 Fiesta Bowl team) who proudly carried the Parkersburg flag for Mountaineer football in the 1980s.
Of late, we’ve seen the likes of Josh Jenkins, Matt Lindamood, Cody Nutter, Michael Molinari and offensive line coach Ron Crook make important contributions to the success of Mountaineer football.
But Parkersburg is not confined to just its gridiron exploits.
Guard Noah Moore was a team captain on Gale Catlett’s 1982 Mountaineer basketball team that won a nation’s-best 23 games in a row and rose to as high as No. 6 in the national rankings that year.
Guard Mike Tibbs was a letterman on the hardwood for WVU in 1993 and Parkersburg's Rex Foster was a long-serving aide on Gale Catlett's basketball staff.
Center Lori Wilson was a valuable member of West Virginia’s 1992 women’s team that made a run to NCAA tournament Sweet 16 that season. Three years prior, Parkersburg’s Judy Eaton was a starting guard on the first NCAA tournament team in women’s basketball history in 1989.
Of course, Parkersburg for years has been a hot bed for gymnastics beginning with Jerry Spencer, who competed at WVU for Coach Bill Bonsall in the early 1960s, and continuing with longtime successful Mountaineer women’s gymnastics coach Linda Burdette, who recently retired in 2011.
Parkersburg even has a representative on this year’s women’s gymnastics team in South High’s Beth Deal.
Mary Beth Held was an all-Big East performer in women’s track and Kim Dorman ran in the NCAA cross country championships for the Mountaineers. Both hail from Parkersburg.
Count Ed Wolfe, Chris Kaltenecker, Nick Zegrea and Eric Grimm among some of the Parkersburgers excelling on the Mountaineer baseball diamond.
The Molinari sisters earned letters in Nikki Izzo-Brown’s powerhouse Mountaineer women’s soccer program, Brandon Rader and Chance Litton were outstanding Parkersburg wrestlers who made names for themselves at WVU, as did George Nedeff, first on the mat and then later as a Mountaineer coach and longtime administrator. Today, George has taken on a higher calling as a Catholic priest.
The late Al Babcock was a Parkersburg native who served as WVU’s sports information director during the war years and was later a regular at Mountaineer basketball games as the team’s official scorer and also at Mountaineer football games as press box steward. Allan Johnson played an important role in Mountaineer football's success in the late 1980s as the program's strength coach.
Parkersburg’s Paul Mancini was a star men’s tennis player at WVU in the late 1980s while Jeff Core and Casey Freed were outstanding performers on pole vault for West Virginia’s men’s track program in the early 1990s.
West Virginia Sports Hall of Famer Dan “Cav” Cavanaugh was born in Brookville, Pa., but was raised in Parkersburg, attended Parkersburg High and later became a standout swimmer for the Mountaineers in the mid-1950s.
Weirton’s Sam Mandich played football and basketball for the Mountaineers in the early 1940s but was equally recognized as a noted high school boy’s basketball coach at Parkersburg High.
The legendary Ben Schwartzwalder, a Mountaineer player during the early 1930s, cut his teeth in coaching in the high school ranks in Parkersburg before embarking upon a College Football Hall of Fame career at Syracuse.
It was said that Schwartzwalder once settled a wrestling match that had ended in a tie by challenging the opposing coach to wrestle it out on the mat. Naturally, Schwartzwalder, who stormed the beaches of Normandy as a captain in the 82nd Airborne during World War II, pinned him in no time and Parkersburg had another notch in the W column.
And of course there is Earle “Greasy” Neale, one of the great names in state athletic lore. Neale played college football at West Virginia Wesleyan, was a starting centerfielder for the Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series (the infamous Black Sox scandal series), led Washington & Jefferson to the 1922 Rose Bowl as a college football coach and later in the 1940s became a Hall of Fame coach for the Philadelphia Eagles.
In between, Neale coached three seasons at WVU during the Great Depression when the Mountaineers were both vastly overscheduled and vastly underfunded.
Although Neale didn’t win many games at West Virginia, he was responsible for recruiting many of the best players of that era, including Pro Football Hall of Famer Joe Stydahar.
I am certain there are other Parkersburg natives that I am missing (and I will surely be reminded of them in the coming days :) ), but as you can see, Parkersburg has a rich athletic history that WVU has greatly benefitted from through the years. That is what I think of when I consider what Mountaineer athletics is about to get in Shane Lyons.
And yes, I still think about that big TV tower on Route 2, too.
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