Mapletown’s Messich becomes Greene County’s winningest football coach
After beating Avella Friday night, Mapletown coach George Messich notched his 123rd win, making him the winningest coach in Greene County history.
George Messich
George Messich didn’t take long to get involved with coaching football at his high school alma mater. He started as head coach the same year he graduated from Pitt.
He was 22 years old.
Last Friday, 38 years later, Messich recorded his 123rd career varsity football win, all at Mapletown, when the Maples survived a 39-33 shootout against Avella in the Tri-County South Conference. With the victory, Messich became the winningest scholastic football coach in Greene County history.
Messich said he had no idea he was even close to the mark until his team statistician for more than two decades, Chris Bates, informed him Saturday morning.
“I was pleased,” Messich said. “But I was really shocked when he called and told me that.”
Though Messich’s longevity in the head coach role is what has made the accomplishment possible, he credited the many players and assistant coaches he’s worked with for helping him achieve it. The kids, after all, are the ones who block, catch, kick and tackle.
“You have to put your kids in a position to make a play. Once you put them in a position to make the play on Friday night, it’s out of your hands,” Messich said. “There’s nothing else you can do.”
Growing up, Messich’s plans for adulthood didn’t involve coaching. He envisoned a career as a laborer, whether down in the local coal mines or at the nearby power plant.
“That’s just what I figured I would do,” Messich said. “That’s what everybody did, but it gave them a great life.”
Messich’s parents wanted him to go to college, so he accepted a football scholarship to Youngstown State. In July of the year before beginning his freshman season, someone at the university called to explain that there was a problem with his transcript and his grades weren’t good enough to enroll.
Through a connection that then-Mapletown principal had at Potomac State College helped Messich quickly pivot and head to the West Virginia junior college that fall. By his senior year, Messich would be starting as an offensive lineman on the Pitt 1976 national championship team.
An unexpected, off-field experience led him on a path to coaching. A week into his first semester at Pitt, a Foundations of Education course, which involved tutoring special needs elementary schoolchildren, made a lasting impact.
“It was a lot of satisfaction just seeing them happy that they achieved something with their homework. It was just a real good feeling. I’ll never forget that,” he said. “Coaching fell into part of it.”
He would go on to major in elementary education and get his coaching start as a volunteer assistant with the Panthers’ junior varsity offensive line while the team paid for him to take a fifth year and finish up his undergraduate degree, an experience he really enjoyed.
Outside of a seven-year gap in the early mid-80s, when he worked as an assistant coach at Waynesburg High School and Mapletown, Messich has run the football program at Mapletown since he was first hired there as a fifth grade teacher in 1978.
While he didn’t know he’d become a teacher – the idea was so random his mother laughed when he first brought it up – Messich always knew he’d return to Mapletown and spend the rest of his life there.
“Everything in my life just led to this,” Messich said. “It really did.”