Mar 26, 2015 5 min read

Defining moments often alter a person’s chosen path in life.

For Laura Montecalvo, it was a serious knee injury that changed everything. A 2006 graduate of Washington High School, Montecalvo, now 27, was a standout in basketball, track & field and volleyball for the Prexies.

From the time she began playing basketball as a 5-year-old with her sister’s third-grade team at the Brownson House, Montecalvo’s life revolved around athletics. Her father, Guy, was a longtime head football coach at Wash High; her mother, Marie, is a former athlete; and her two siblings, Jimmy and Suzanne, participated in sports.

For almost 10 years, Montecalvo was the student manager for the football teams at Wash High and Canon-McMillan, when her father was head coach there. She observed him and his staff, soaking in how coaches communicated with players and how certain situations were handled.

“She would pester me to drag her to our stadium at Wash High to practice the long jump and triple jump relentlessly,” Guy Montecalvo said of his daughter. “Most kids want to go to the playground or play with dolls when they are a young girl, but she really embraced that type of thing. She always had a passion for competition.”

After recovering from a torn ACL in her left knee, she was a first team selection on the Observer-Reporter All-District Basketball Team in her senior season, averaging 12.7 points, seven assists and five rebounds per game as a point guard. She claimed her first WPIAL gold medal later that year on the 1,600-meter relay team and finished her track and field career with 13 medals.

Montecalvo earned a scholarship from California University to play basketball and participate in track and field. During her freshman year with the Vulcans in 2006-07, Montecalvo’s season was cut short by a torn ACL in her right knee.

It was the latest in a long line of devastating blows to a promising career. She tore the meniscus in both knees, broke her tailbone and suffered a serious ligament tear in her ankle.

Doubts lingered in her mind, but she did not want to give up. Montecalvo rehabbed the knee and rejoined the Vulcans as a sophomore, but lost the lateral ability and explosiveness that made her one of the top high school athletes in the WPIAL.

She was forced to decide whether she would abandon athletics and focus on her devotion to education, or follow in her father’s footsteps. Guy, who led Wash High to two WPIAL Class AA titles and a state championship in 2001, had his football career at Penn State curtailed by injuries.

“Experiencing that yourself was one of the hardest things I had ever gone through,” Laura Montecalvo said. “To essentially work my entire middle school and high school years to try to get an athletic scholarship and then to have that taken from you, it was very hard for me.”

Montecalvo worked as a student manager at Cal before becoming a graduate assistant. She received her master’s degree in Counselor Education in 2012, while learning the intricacies of the game under former head coach Darcie Vincent then current coach Jess Strom, who was Montecalvo’s position coach and now has the Vulcans in the NCAA Division II National Championship game.

Assistant coaching stints at Canon-McMillan and Trinity followed before everything came full circle last April when Montecalvo was named the head varsity girls basketball coach at Chartiers-Houston.

Some young coaches are not ready for the next step. It did not take long for C-H athletic director Kurt Kesneck to see she was unique.

“She was excited to take control of her own program,” Kesneck said. “She took over at a young age and she knew in her mind that she was ready. I think that’s the one thing that sort of got all of us. She knew where she wanted to end up.”

Montecalvo inherited a program that had just two returning seniors, but an influx of promising young talent. Adversity followed. A freshman standout suffered a season-ending injury, C-H lost its season-opener to Brownsville and struggled with consistency early because of inexperience.

Growing pains translated to an unforgettable season. Chartiers-Houston reached the WPIAL playoffs where it defeated Mohawk in the first round, finished with 19 wins and had back-to-back, thrilling, come-from-behind wins in the PIAA Class AA playoffs over Harbor Creek and Carlynton to advance to the quarterfinals, reaching the state’s elite eight.

The two state playoff wins are the most in a single season in program history. The 1983 Bucs defeated Hickory in the first round before losing to North Catholic. With an emphasis on toughness, defense and a relentless style of play, which Montecalvo credits Vincent and Strom for instilling in her, Chartiers-Houston’s playoff run was remarkable.

If not for a fateful injury, Montecalvo might never be coaching. The anger, frustration and regret that clouded her mind following that movement have subsided. Now, she beams with optimism when discussing her players and is hopeful for a happier ending in 2016.

“It was probably the most satisfying thing I’ve done in my life, to be honest,” Montecalvo said of her first year coaching. “To take those kids from where we started in the summer to where we ended a couple weeks ago, it was an incredible journey for all of us.”

The pride she found in watching her players grind out upset wins in the state playoffs is unmatched. As the Bucs completed the comeback win over Carlynton, Montecalvo’s excitement reflected the solace she has found in coaching.

“I can honestly say I’ve found more fulfillment in being a coach than I think I did being an athlete,” she said. “I think everything happens to us for a reason, and I think I had my career ended so I can do this. I really do.”