A-K Valley Hall of Fame nominee Phelps continues to have impact, success with Burrell

By: Michael Love
Saturday, April 23, 2022 | 3:40 PM

Ray Sharick was just beginning his Burrell varsity track and field career as a freshman when he met Frank Phelps.

Many hours of training with Phelps in and out of the weight room, Sharick said, was instrumental in helping him earn a trip to the PIAA track and field championships as a sophomore.

Additional work together, Sharick said, led him to capture the WPIAL and PIAA high jump titles as a senior in 1986 and eventually make his way to the men’s team at Penn State.

“Coach Phelps was this combination of extreme competence, commitment and motivation all at the same time,” said Sharick, one of four Burrell individual state champions Phelps has witnessed in his 42 years as a track and field head coach and assistant with the Bucs.

“I learned pretty quickly, especially with his weight training program, how much he knew about getting kids prepared for a season and prepared to compete during a season. He was always studying the sport of track and field, learning new things and techniques. That level of knowledge and commitment was unmatched with the other coaches I’ve had over the years.”

Phelps began his track and field coaching career in the late 1970s at Valley before making his move to Burrell, where he remains.

It has been a four-decades long career of mentorship to Burrell athletes of all disciplines, especially his sprinting focus, to which he has garnered a great deal of acclaim.

His girls 400-meter relay teams have won 12 WPIAL titles, including five in a row from 2015-19, and two state championships (1998 and 2019). The girls 1,600 relay has captured WPIAL gold seven times.

In all, Phelps has borne witness to 36 WPIAL relay and individual champions, a plethora of other WPIAL medalists, six PIAA champions, four state silver medalists and countless other PIAA medal-winning performances.

For all he has accomplished in coaching the sport of track and field to hundreds of Burrell athletes and others throughout the Alle-Kiski Valley, Phelps will be one of 10 inductees — along with Chris Como, Jeff Cortileso, Harry ‘Shorty’ Crytzer, Robert Foster, Dianne Haney, Rich Kriston, Terry Preece, Lizzie Suwala Shaeffer and Bobby White — celebrated at the 51st A-K Valley Sports Hall of Fame banquet May 21 at the New Kensington Quality Inn.

“This is a great honor, and I am humbled by it,” said Phelps, an Illinois native who came to the Pittsburgh area to work and attend graduate school at Carnegie Mellon in the late 1970s.

“You do the work you love, day in and day out, and you don’t think of the long term. When you get to a point, it’s humbling that somebody paid attention to your work. I am so happy to have had such an influence on the athletes’ lives because it is more than just athletic ability in high school. It is how they deal with life and the facts of life.”

Several of Phelps’ former athletes sent letters of support for his HOF election and describing his influence on their Burrell track and field careers and their lives overall.

Under his tutelage, Nikki Scherer, currently at Pitt, captured individual state titles in the 100 in 2015 and 400 in 2017. She added PIAA runner-up finishes in the 200 in 2016 and ’17.

“He means so much to me, and we’re still so very close,” said Scherer, who is recovering from injury this spring but will be back for her final Pitt track season in 2023. “There were times I was stubborn and didn’t always agree with every workout he wanted to do, but I knew he knew what was best.

“Looking back, I realized he had my best interest at heart all the time. What he did for me he has done for so many others at Burrell, and not just Burrell but other surrounding school districts. He’s one of the best coaches and best persons I’m sure I will ever be around in my life.”

Close to two decades earlier, the girls 400 relay of Kara Tate, Ali Woods, Kristen Courtney and Melissa Simons captured the PIAA championship.

“Coach is a genius,” Simons wrote in her letter of support to the HOF selection committee in 2018. “He knows track and field inside and out. Athletes from other schools seek him out to get just an hour of his time in order to learn from him.

“He keeps logs and journals of his athletes and studies film. He can give you the equations and formulas that explain how and when an athlete will have a peak performance. He volunteers time, energy and money to his athletes, and never bats an eye or asks for a thing in return.”

With the girls 400 relay team of Alle Kuhns, Jocelyn Vickers, Madi Walsh and Olivia Kelly winning WPIAL and PIAA gold in 2019 and three of the four coming back for the 2020 season, Phelps felt the relay had a good shot of repeating both titles.

Early in the 2020 preseason, the relay was living up to Phelps’ expectations. But the onset of the covid pandemic in mid March eventually wiped out all high school athletics that spring and spoiled the relay’s repeat hopes.

“I thought the girls (in 2020) would’ve been the fastest I ever had,” Phelps said. “The relay was a lot faster than when they won in 2019. Their times in the 60 meters during indoor, that told me we had a pretty fast group.

“You can imagine how tough it was and how bad everyone felt when it was announced that there wasn’t going to be a season. Everyone was so used to being outside in the spring working in practice and getting ready for meets. It was a weird feeling to not have that.”

A-K Valley Sports Hall of Fame

51st induction banquet

Sat., May 21 7 p.m.

Quality Inn, New Kensington

Tickets: $30

Contact: Larry Lutz 724-822-3695; Bill Heasley 724-882-3079; Fred Soilis 412-736-1809

Michael Love is a TribLive reporter covering sports in the Alle-Kiski Valley and the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh. A Clearfield native and a graduate of Westminster (Pa.), he joined the Trib in 2002 after spending five years at the Clearfield Progress. He can be reached at mlove@triblive.com.

Tags: Burrell