Ward’s winning ways have Becahi back
First-year coach has led Golden Hawks to 3-0 start
Tyler Ward said his wife, Kate, is a big football fan. In fact, if you look at Ward’s X account, formerly Twitter, you’ll see a wedding picture of him and Kate wearing eye black.
But Mrs. Ward is a Liberty High graduate. So, when Ward’s Bethlehem Catholic team takes on the Hurricanes in the final Eastern Pennsylvania Conference game of Week 4 at 7 p.m. Saturday at Bethlehem Area School District Stadium, he’s not sure what colors his wife will be wearing at the game.
“I hope she wears brown, but I guess you never know,” Ward said with a laugh.
Undoubtedly, Kate will be wearing Becahi colors as will many other Golden Hawks fans who have been energized by the team’s 3-0 start.
After an offseason in which so many rumors were going around about the future of the program and the school, Becahi’s 3-0 start has made a profound statement that the tradition-rich Golden Hawks haven’t gone anywhere.
They entered the weekend as one of four undefeated teams left in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference and by the time they take the field Saturday that number will be reduced by at least one since two unbeatens through three weeks, Nazareth and Parkland, played on Friday night.
Ward, a former all-Patriot League linebacker at Lehigh before graduating in 2014, is one of six new coaches in the EPC this season. While most of the other head coaches who were hired in the offseason were known personalities — Matt Senneca at Easton and Rob Melosky at Allentown Central Catholic for example — the Ward hiring came out of the blue, or more specifically Birmingham, Alabama, where he was the offensive coordinator and assistant head coach at Oak Mountain High School.
Kate and Tyler Ward were looking to come back to the Lehigh Valley when the Becahi job opened up. So far, so good, for the Ward family and Becahi football.
“We’re obviously happy with the win total and we’re just trying to keep things rolling,” said Ward, who was also an assistant at Lehigh and on the Franklin & Marshall
staff when current Lafayette coach John Troxell was there. “I think anybody who is super competitive is looking forward to the challenges ahead. We want to go out and play the best every week and when you play in the EPC that’s what you’re going to get.”
The Golden Hawks have beaten Pleasant Valley, Whitehall and Pocono Mountain East. After Liberty, they close out September with Easton and Emmaus and then October brings Freedom, Parkland, Nazareth and Allentown Central Catholic — all programs that have won district titles in the past three years.
Ward hasn’t been around the Lehigh Valley for a long time, but long enough to know there’s a gauntlet of quality opponents ahead.
“We know it’s going to get a lot harder,” he said. “I keep telling the guys that as long as we can keep focusing on ourselves and just try to win the mirror test every day, we’re going to put ourselves in good situations.”
Ward said one of the goals he established when he took over the job in February was to win the city of Bethlehem.
“We want to beat Liberty and we want to beat Freedom every year,” he said. “Those are two games that we really care about and I know in the past, they have done OK against both of them but I don’t think we’ve beaten Freedom in a few years. And I know Liberty has had some really good teams and these are always good games. But to go out and win Bethlehem is something we always want to do.”
Ward attended last week’s Parkland-Liberty game in person and said “it was just nice to just sit at a high school game for the first time in a long time. So that was enjoyable to start with, but I thought both teams were very good. Parkland is very talented across the board and Liberty’s running back [Gabe Green] is an awesome football player. He’s scrappy, he gets after it. Jake Pukszyn at receiver is very talented. Honestly, they’re very similar to us with some really good young players and also a nice nucleus of older guys to lead that group. It’s going to be a battle of teams who are similar in a lot of ways.”
Becahi’s young stars include
sophomore quarterback Cayden Vassa has thrown for 371 yards and seven TDs and his brother Carter Vassa, a freshman, has caught 12 passes for 213 yards and three scores.
Senior running back Jacob Sutton has run for 308 yards and three scores and junior linebacker Carlos Perez is among the top defensive players in the league with 24 tackles and three sacks in three games.
Liberty counters with Green, who has run for 381 yards and seven TDs in the Hurricanes’ 2-1 start. Quarterbacks Tre Parham and Caden Vermuelen have combined for more than 400 yards passing and Pukszyn, who is also one of the area’s best basketball players, has 12 receptions for 185 yards and two scores.
The winner of the game will be at least 3-1 and be in position to secure a postseason spot and in Class 4A the EPC teams that qualify generally have a shot at going a long way.
At the moment, that’s not Ward’s concern. He is trying to take things day-by-day and weekto-week in his first season as a high school head coach.
“The football part of it has been pretty normal,” Ward said. “If you ask any coach they’ll tell you the football is the easy part of the job and that’s the part they love doing the most. A lot of the other things are new and I’m trying to learn as I go whether it’s fundraising or doing different things within the school or dealing with the parents a little more than I used to as a coordinator. Honestly, the media stuff, too. I get more phone calls and do more interviews now than I ever have. So, there’s a lot more on your plate than just football. Before, all I did was sit there and watch film all day. So, it’s still a learning curve for me.”
One thing Ward has learned is when the coin toss is done.
“I didn’t know they did the coin toss 30 minutes before the game here because in Alabama we did it right before the game started,” he said. “So I was running into the locker room to start talking to the kids and our captain was like ‘Coach, where are you going? We have to do the coin toss.’ So I had to run back out. Every day there are things to learn, and things to improve on. We’re not perfect yet, but we have a coaching staff and kids who are working very hard and that’s what really has been fun so far.”