Up Close With PSR
Guy Montecalvo

Guy Montecalvo is the head football coach and athletic director at Canon-McMillan High School. Montecalvo has coached football for 29 years since sustaining career ending knee-injuries at Penn State. Most of his coaching career was spent at Washington High School, where his teams made several WPIAL Championship appearances and two state championship appearances. Montecalvo produced the only Washington County football team to ever win a state championship in 2001. PSR’s Jeff Breese caught up with Montecalvo in his office at Canon-Mac recently.

PSR: There are so many camps these days. What is the impact of football camps?

Guy Montevalco: A lot of people go to team camps now; where they compete in 7 on 7 situations…We really don’t do that. We’re probably a dinosaur in that area… I encourage my kids to go to, if they want to, to go to individual position camps… The showcase camps, like locally Metro Index… I think they are very worthy and I do encourage my kids, if they can afford it and they want to go to it, to go to those camps because we had a few guys go this year to Butler’s camp, which was a senior only camp in December and I know it was a windfall for two of our boys who ended up getting scholarships…

PSR: Is there too much corporate sponsorship in sports?

GM: I think it is a necessary evil and something that I have seen really change over the past 10 years, because I can remember at Washington for a number of years our board was not amenable at all to having any type of corporate sponsorships. I think now that feeling has changed most places.

PSR: Is it difficult to raise funds for high school programs?

GM: Some people may have goals of raising 5,000 dollars in some of the minor sport programs upwards to some organizations goals are 60,000 dollars… The community can only take so much pressure financially…Some of the smaller communities it’s more difficult. You have a rural community where there are not a lot of businesses; there is not the opportunity to have corporate sponsors and commercial sponsors. It’s got to be difficult there.

PSR: Is it more difficult to coach at Quad A and Triple A level?

GM: Coaching football is coaching football…

At the Quad A level it’s relative because yes you are playing opponents that have more skilled athletes, more size, more depth but at the same time you have those things available to you as well. It’s very much a misnomer that it is more difficult to coach at the upper levels.

PSR: What led to you leaving Washington for Canon-Mac?

GM: I would have been very happy to stay at Washington probably until I couldn’t teach or coach anymore...we were going through some difficult times financially at Washington, we almost became distressed school district. The faculty the support service workers at Washington bit the bullet and touch freezes for three or four years. That allowed us to get out of the red and get back in the black and start to accumulate the fund balance. It was at that time that we had some real needs with our facility. Our budget had been cut significantly…I asked if we could have our budget back to where it was in the early nineties, this is in 2002 and 2003, because equipment costs had escalated tremendously. I put together a package and went to the business manager and showed him where we were with costs, showed him how my budget had decreased almost 35% while prices of certain things had increased by almost 100%...I got into a situation with some of our hierarchy. I felt there were some people that were disingenuous with myself and our staff about some things. There were some remarks made that I did not appreciate that were outside of what was the truth. If those remarks were not going to be rectified then I had to draw a line because principle is the most important thing…It just got to a point where I made a stand as to what I believed in and how I believed we had been wronged and it wasn’t rectified, so I very quietly submitted my resignation and just tried to go away quietly. I was going to stay there and teach and coach track. Then this opportunity four or five months later came up. There’s people that say all kind of things, ‘he resigned because he knew they weren’t going to be real good the next couple years.’ That couldn’t be further from the truth…I liked the challenge of having a young team, the one that’s not real experienced and trying to build them. That’s why you get into coaching…Some folks thought maybe I left because financially it was going to be more lucrative…If that was the case, I would have left 5 or 6 times before. It had nothing to do with money.

PSR: How important to your transition were the staff members that you brought with you from Washington?

GM: I’ve been very fortunate to have some quality human beings that are of very strong character, very strong morality… be with us for extended periods of time… moving here to Canon-McMillan July 1st of the 2003 season, not knowing the kids, not knowing anything about the philosophies down here, our players not knowing anything about our offensive and defensive systems… we play a lot of read and react defense combined with some attack stuff. Offensively a completely different system, the only way we were able to implement that and win those first 7 games…was because of the assistant coaching staff being together for so long…We melded with the assistants from Canon-MacMillian that we kept on…and made a nice mesh. That transition went very smoothly. We had to be ready in 6 weeks to start coaching…It’s worked out very well, it’s been a lot of fun.

PSR: What was the most difficult part of leaving Washington?

GM: The most difficult thing was leaving my own daughter, who I had looked forward to coaching for a long time…Now that I am athletic director here I miss a lot of the things that she participates in…another tough thing was leaving the kids that we were going to coach in football and track.

Who is the best player you ever coached?

The best player we ever coached certainly was Brian Davis. He was Parade All-American Player of the Year. You don’t get any better than that. The kid he beat out for that award was Emmett Smith.

What is your favorite car that you have owned?

I always have the same kind of car. I’ve either had a Crown Victoria or Grand Marquis for the last I don’t know how many years…probably, the favorite car I ever had was the little Oldsmobile F 85. I was a senior in high school when I got that car and I held onto it as long as I could.

What’s your favorite recreation?

Trout fishing without a doubt… I can go trout fishing, I can be out there eight hours and it goes by likes this. Often times I am out there 8 hours and my wife wonders where I am.

What’s your favorite place for ice cream?

It’s Sarris now no question about it. Back in Washington it’s probably Bruester’s.