Inaugural Riverhounds Hall of Famers honored
Original team members, executives are part of anniversary festivities
Justin Evans recalls a time during his adolescence, from the late 1980s into the early 1990s, when it was impossible to find a game of soccer on television to watch in Western Pennsylvania.
Evans, a Peters Township native, took solo trips to Europe as a teenager, first to Belgium, with a layover in Amsterdam, then to England, to gain experience in pursuit of a professional career.
But Friday night, Evans, the first draft pick in Pittsburgh Riverhounds history, permanently was honored closer to home as part of the inaugural class in the Riverhounds SC Hall of Fame.
The group included Evans, selected first in the Riverhounds 1999 expansion draft, David Flavius, the club’s leader in games played with 183 and goals with 58, original owner Paul Heasley, Dave Kasper, the club’s first vice president and general manager and their first coach, John Kowalski.
“As a kid coming up, there was really nothing to look forward to playing soccer,” Evans said to about 100 attendees Friday night in the Hall of Fame induction ceremony at Highmark Stadium. “[Paul Heasley] put that on
the map for me, and for all the kids around this city, which is a massive, massive thing.”
Fittingly, all five inductees helped shape not only the formative years of the Riverhounds, who are celebrating their 20th anniversary season in 2019, but also soccer culture in Pittsburgh.
“It gives me goosebumps to know that I helped produce, helped create, something that got popular,” Flavius said.
In those early Riverhounds seasons, home matches took place at Bethel Park High School. For drainage reasons, the field would slope down at the corner flags, lowering the pitch elevation, while the midfield area had a hump allowing players such as Evans to gain a brief height advantage.
It’s a far cry from Highmark Stadium, the Riverhounds 5,000-seat stadium in Station Square which opened in 2013.
Building a soccer-specific stadium in Pittsburgh, along with the creation of the Riverhounds and the incorporation of a team youth academy, were three things Heasley wanted to accomplish with the club, according to his son, Lucas.
At the ceremony, Lucas, a former Riverhounds goalkeeper, accepted the Hall of Fame honor for his father, who died in June 2013. Lucas said while his father lacked in-depth soccer knowledge, he had the vision to know that the club could find success and make soccer more readily available in Pittsburgh, as opposed to how it was for his son.
“I like to joke that the Riverhounds were started just for me,” Lucas Heasley said. “But the truth is my father started this team for the community and for all the kids that had a passion for soccer. He saw the need for professional soccer to be part of the Pittsburgh landscape.”
The names of the inductees were on display Saturday at the team’s 1-1 draw with the Tampa Bay Rowdies on glass panels outside the stadium’s club area.
“We don’t have a chance for any of this without those first steps that those guys made,” current Riverhounds coach Bob Lilley said.
Kowalski led those teams from the sideline, and made a conscious decision to play a flowing, high-energy brand of soccer that both generated goals — about 1.84 goals per game — and was attractive to new fans.
“Playing attractive soccer, playing offensive soccer, which requires lots of skill, I think the kids were able to pick up on it,” Kowalski said. “There were oohs and aahs, it wasn’t just a kind of ordinary ‘kick the ball forward and chase’ style of play.”
Lucas now coaches at Peters Township High School, Flavius does so with the local club team Century FC and Kowalski as the women’s soccer coach at Robert Morris University.
All continue to play an active part to ensure soccer’s presence remains strong in the region.
“There’s so much room to go up to establish the franchise [Riverhounds] at the top of the league, expansion to MLS, who knows?” Lucas said. “The door’s still wide open. I think it’s a good, maybe halfway mark, to look at and say ‘We’ve done a lot, we still have some more to go.’”