winner winner chicken dinner! Rover- im gonna assume you mostly knew this stuff and did not google or check the PIAA site!
Wow- Southern Columbia- I lost count but I think it is like 15-16- and over almost 30 years- crazy impressive and consistent.
So, my follow- up- I knew most of these big schools- but not Liberty? What is the background? Any chance they could return to greatness? What level do they play now?
Cliff notes - Bethlehem has good football!
However, for a long time, Bethlehem Catholic was the dominant team in the city, and had all of the players. That was enough to sustain a really good program - state champs in 1988 and 1990, great battles with ACC in the early/mid 90s. Voluntarily up to 4A in the late 90s/early 00s and were breaks away from winning a state title at some point from 99-02. But after recruiting accusations and lots of local politics around conference alignment, their coach resigned so that Becahi could get into a conference. Suddenly, Becahi was not the same kind of destination if you weren’t playing for Bob Stem.
At the same time-ish, Liberty (the public high school in the city of Bethlehem) hired Tim Moncman as their head coach in 2000. Liberty had not been very good since the early 70s, but is a huge school (at the time 800-900 kids in a class) that had some athletic, if not football success. But Moncman completely flipped the script. The 30 year old had been the wiz-kid defensive coordinator at Moravian before spending a year at Southern Lehigh. Moncman was really good - and he was able to take advantage of all the best players in Bethlehem not automatically going to Becahi. He surrounded himself with really good assistants (Bo Orlando, Bill DeNofa, and Jim Tkach the three big names) and did a great job hanging onto talent. He took a couple years to get going, but by 2004 they were a top 6ish team in the state (10-2, lost in the D11 finals) then went to back-to-back finals in 05 and 06, were 12-1 and lost in OT in D11 playoffs (which sent Parkland to the state final) and then they broke through and won it in 2008. They had lots of talent, particularly at quarterback - Dan Persa was the quarterback from 2003-2006 (they had the guts to start him as a freshman and let him grow) and he ended up an All Big Ten QB at Northwestern. They replaced him with Anthony Gonzalez, who was a four star athlete who dominated the state final in 2008. But off the top of my head I can think of right FBS guys and ten FCS guys in that run from 2004-2008. Devin Street played for a while in the NFL as a receiver for the Cowboys was their most successful guy at higher levels.
Moncman and the Liberty administration banged heads, culminating in what I understand was a difficult 2009 after the state title (where Gonzalez tore his meniscus and they never really found their footing). Moncman resigned after that season - both for some family reasons and to walk away from some of the headaches from his higher ups. Liberty then made a series of bizarre coaching hires - Dave Brown came in and made them a Wing-T team after they were one of the cutting edge offenses in the Valley, then they replaced him with a career JV coach. And the bottom has fallen out of the program with bad coaching hires and general neglect. Moncman is now the head coach at Parkland and has been to four state playoffs in eight years, after a run of four straight state playoffs and a state final as their DC.
Liberty is a tough place - it’s an urban school, lots of potential off the field issues to deal with, and that is something they excelled in when the program was humming. But it takes the right kind of guy(s) and full investment to do that job right, which hasn’t happened since Moncman left. Becahi had a resurgence in the mid 2010s with a bunch of state final fours, with a lot of kids who would have played at Liberty. Now, both programs are in the toilet due to mismanagement in both spots. Freedom, meanwhile (in Bethlehem township) has had their best stretch ever since those two programs have been down.
I don’t see Liberty being good in the future, not that it’s impossible, but they have not been interested in winning since Moncman left. They’re like a Harrisburg, Reading, Easton, etc. type school. High ceiling, but lots to do to actually get there.
