‘Friday Night Lights Meets Lord of the Flies’ in Mt. Lebanon
"Strike Season," a new memoir by Michael Eck, recalls an unprecedented high school football season when the players coached themselves.
PHOTOS COURTESY MICHAEL ECK
It’s a story that’s nothing short of remarkable, and yet oddly forgotten.
“Strike Season: The True Story of a Team That Played On When the Coaches Walked Out” is one-time Mt. Lebanon High School quarterback Michael Eck’s attempt to celebrate the former — and address the latter.
“I’ve heard that a fair bit,” Eck says of people being unfamiliar with the Blue Devils going 5-0 while players coached part of a season themselves during a teachers’ strike in 1979. “That was part of my motivation, to get it out of my head.”
He didn’t stop there.
For his memoir, Eck interviewed teammates, coaches and the head of the teachers’ union at the time; he also reviewed school board meeting minutes and press clippings in an effort to clarify details and fill in any blanks he might have lost to time.
The result is “Friday Night Lights meets Lord of the Flies,” according to publisher Simon & Shuster.
“We completely underestimated how hard it was going to be,” Eck remembers of the team’s decision to coach themselves. “There’s a reason you don’t have 16-year-olds coaching each other. It should never happen, and it shouldn’t have happened because we’re 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds — knuckleheads.
“My life would be dramatically different if we hadn’t figured out a way to do it.”
PHOTO COURTESY MICHAEL ECK
Mt. Lebanon, 2-0 and No. 1 in Pittsburgh Press and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette polls when the strike struck, won its first game without legendary head coach Art Walker and his staff, 35-7, over Upper St. Clair. Led by Eck, a team captain and the de facto head coach, defensive back Tim Sullivan and running backs Anthony Agostinelli and Jon Rietz, the Blue Devils wound up winning five straight games and outscoring its opponents by a combined 127-7.
To pull it off, Eck says the team had to first believe it was possible, which they initially didn’t; they begged for the chance to keep playing anyway.
According to Eck, the teachers’ union ultimately wanted the players-coached team to fail, which might hasten a settlement in the union’s favor. Conversely, the school board was rooting for the team’s success as a way to leverage the teachers.
“We were used as pawns,” Eck recalls. “Two sets of adults decided that was something they could do.”
With Division I scholarships at stake, the players accepted the unprecedented challenge head on. One of those players was tight end John Frank. He went on to play for Ohio State and the San Francisco 49ers.
“Our futures were on the line,” Eck says.
Eck estimates 25 of the Mt. Lebanon players continued to play football on the college level after high school ended, including 19 on a full scholarship. But the stories didn’t end there.
“It has been remarkable to re-connect with people that participated in it, and how each of them said it had impacted their lives, that without that season their lives would have been different period, full stop, end of story,” insists Eck, now 63 and a managing director at M. Klein and Company in New York. “Everyone had a story, how it impacted their lives.”
Eck is telling them because they’re worth telling, and to benefit STEER, the non-profit he runs to assist at-risk student athletes with promise.
It’s quite likely they won’t be forgotten as quickly this time.
Meet the Author
The Historical Society of Mt. Lebanon will host a conversation with Michael Eck from 1 to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24, at Mellon Middle School in Mt. Lebanon. Tickets are $10 for members and $15 for non-members. “Strike Season” is published by Regalo Press and distributed by Simon & Schuster, available at bookstores and through Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and similar outlets.
