Hall of fame honors area hockey ‘guru’
Tomorrow at the Sheraton Station Square, longtime local hockey figure Len Semplice will be inducted in the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame Western Chapter along with eight other Western Pennsylvania sports figures.
The honor for Semplice speaks not only of his career as a hockey coach, but also of how far the sport has grown locally since he began his coaching career as a 19-year-old head coach of Upper St. Clair High School in 1976.
”Difference between now and then is that there are a lot better skaters now,” said Semplice, who first began playing hockey at Moore Park in Brookline as a teen. “Back then there were a handful of players who were good skaters . The reason was hockey rinks came up all over.”
Semplice got the USC job after playing just four years of organized hockey himself, beginning as a freshman at South Hills Catholic — the fore-runner of Seton-La-Salle — during the infancy of the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League.
He guided the Panthers for eight seasons, winning the Class AAA Pennsylvania State Championship out of the old South Hills Interscholastic Hockey League in 1980 during the magical “City of Champions” era for Pittsburgh sports.
Four years later he became the head coach at Central Catholic before becoming the first American coach of the Ontario Hockey Association Tier 2 Junior A Markham Laidlaws in 1988.
Later he would become the head coach of the Ontario Hockey League’s Major Junior A Owen Sound Platers, the general manager and head coach of the United States Hockey League’s Junior A Wisconsin Capitals, and the head coach of HC Fassa in Italy’s First Division Pro League before returning to Pittsburgh to guide Shady Side Academy in 1996 as their director of hockey operations.
“He had a huge influence on me in terms of how I viewed the game,” said Bishop Canevin coach Kevin Zeilmanski, who played for Semplice at Central Catholic in the 1980s and eventually succeeded him as Vikings head coach a decade later.
“I didn’t play my first two years at Central. I was just a kid from Bloomfield who played in the streets. He was very strict [as a coach] and handed me a playbook.
“That’s an instance that steered my life in a different direction. I didn’t even know hockey playbooks existed. Once I learned it, it was how I was able to compete with kids with more experience. It was a big impact on my life.
“It wasn’t easy to play for him. He was very detailed orientated and there were lots of consequences. But the strategies of the game are something I loved.”
“The players you’re closer to were the ones you were most strict with. They realize what effect you had in their lives,” Semplice said.
Semplice went to Shady Side Academy for several reasons — security, facilities (the Indians have their own rink), and the chance to return to the Pittsburgh area. In his decade at SSA he is proud to have created the Midwest Prep Hockey League for the Indians to play in and that they are a varsity hockey team with full school support, not a club team like most of the high school teams in the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League.
He also prides himself that six of the players he coached in junior hockey made it to the NHL.
In addition to Semplice, two other figures with ties to the South Xtra circulation area will be inducted tomorrow night — Beth Friday Bovey, who was a standout basketball player at Upper St. Clair High School and then Duquesne University, and Dori Anderson Oldaker, the current girls basketball coach at Mt. Lebanon High School, where she has won three PIAA and three WPIAL Class AAAA championships.
The event begins at 6 p.m. and tickets are $50 each and can be purchased by calling Dan Cardone at 412-915-3669 or by email at cardonedjc@gmail.com .