Lee Zelkowitz’s first desire after hip surgery is to walk pain free. The 71-year-old Penn Hills coach hopes he may get back to running on occasion.
But Zelkowitz, who took over as head coach of the Indians track and field team in 2005, plans to take some time this summer to contemplate retirement.
“I’ll probably come back,” Zelkowitz said. “I still love the kids. It’s not just at Penn Hills, but it’s different now. The runners I have now couldn’t do the workouts that my mid-distance and distance runners used to do. There are kids that are tough and they work, but it’s not the majority anymore.”
Penn Hills athletic director James Eckels has been forced to hit the ground running since taking over the job March 1. The Indians have struggled to keep coaches, for a variety of reasons, since the pandemic.
In the past few months, football coach Charles Morris resigned after four years, and baseball coach Joe Capobianco stepped down after two seasons. The girls soccer program is choosing to play an independent schedule after the new enrollment cycle would have seen the program go from Class 3A to 4A.
While the search for a football coach will see no shortage of applicants, finding people interested in coaching volleyball, softball and baseball in a district like Penn Hills isn’t easy.
All of those programs have struggled with numbers and are mired in long stretches of losing seasons because of the lack of manpower on the field, the cost associated with playing many of those sports and the lack of consistent feeder programs from the grassroots level, among other reasons.
“It’s hard to recruit coaches to apply for those positions with the lack of feeder programs,” Eckels said. “There are a lot of basic skills with softball and baseball you need to build from the youth level. It’s borderline dangerous to have kids not know how to catch a ball and start in seventh or eighth grade because that is when kids are starting to throw hard.”
Penn Hills has seen coaching changes in nearly every sport, turning over the same position multiple times, since 2020. Bob Martini (fitness), Chris Giles (boys basketball), Robert Cash (girls basketball), Jeremy Packer (wrestling), Richard Parks (tennis) and Zelkowitz are the only ones who are still left in their positions.
Giles and Parks started in 2020.
When Kevin Truman took over as boys soccer coach in 2024, he had 25-26 players come out for JV and varsity. He’s happy the number has grown closer to 34 for the upcoming season. Truman said he was happy to partner with the Penn Hills Soccer Association, and the high school team is leading a clinic for the youth program for the first time this summer.
“If you look at their Facebook page, they will post a weekend roundup including our U19 team,” said Truman, a 1988 Penn Hills graduate. “Last year, we made a lot of progress and had them come out for our Senior Night. They have about eight travel teams, which isn’t like at Norwin or Plum, but it’s the best I’ve seen since pre-pandemic.”
At the varsity level, Penn Hills had to be creative to fill roles. Former athletic director Stephanie Strauss took over the girls volleyball program in 2023 when the Indians couldn’t find a coach. Strauss was fortunate that she was overqualified for the job. She was a decorated collegiate player at Juniata and later served as an assistant coach with Navy’s program.
Current Penn Hills boys volleyball coach Will Piccolino was still playing collegiately at Carlow when he took over the team in 2023. Zelkowitz resigned from being the cross country coach in 2022, but had to step back in the following fall when the replacement resigned because of personal reasons.
“I couldn’t even get a team together,” Zelkowitz said. “When you have five or seven guys and four show up to practice, what do you tell them, to turn in your uniform if they don’t show up? Then you won’t have a team. More and more kids don’t want to do multiple sports.”
Retaining coaches and building pride in the community is a fight Eckels has familiarity with.
Eckels, who played football collegiately at Clarion, is from McKeesport, which also has struggled with numbers for sports and programs outside of football since the steel industry collapsed and sent the community’s population down with it.
Penn Hills’ population peaked at more than 60,000 in the 1970s but has steadily fallen since and sits at 41,059 as of the last census in 2020. The school district — and youth sports programs — have taken a major hit over the years.
“We lose a lot of students to charter and other educational options,” Eckels said. “We want people to know this isn’t the same Penn Hills. We want to use some of the same strategies McKeesport used. There are a lot of people here now living in the community, we want everyone to understand that everyone is welcome. We want old people and new people to come out and set a standard for excellence. That’s what they wanted from us at McKeesport — to be the best we could be.”
Truman said he recently was talking to his son, Jesse, about how the size of the district has changed. Jesse will graduate with fewer than 300 students.
“I was talking about how I was part of the ‘little’ class of 1988 that had 742 kids,” Truman said. “When my brothers went, there were more than 1,000.”
Eckels highlighted some of the work that Capobianco did during his tenure as a strong example. Capobianco had his players volunteering at food kitchens and getting out to local churches.
Being visible in a community is important, Eckels believes.
“We want everyone to get to the point where everyone wants to help everyone excel,” Eckels said. “We want people to be able to help their neighbors. If we can get kids out in the community volunteering, maybe we can get more people to go to our games and events.”