SPORTS STAR RETURNS TO LEAD ALIQUIPPA
Former Aliquippa football standout Woods returns home to make a difference
It is the second day of heat acclimatization practices for the football team at Aliquippa High School, and a man in the end zone of the field stands out — for no other reasons than his dress and his job title.
Phillip Woods is clad in a white dress shirt, pants and dress shoes, while standing next to some men in coaches’ garb and players in shoulder pads and helmets. Hey, it’s not often the superintendent of schools comes to a high school football heat practice and watches intently.
On Aug. 9, Woods became the new superintendent of the Aliquippa School District. One day later, he was at football practice in his dress clothes. He stood on the same field where he used to practice.
For Woods, his new job provides a homecoming. He is a former Aliquippa standout player.
“Some people want to go away from home and never want to come back,” Woods said. “I’ve been trying to get back to Aliquippa since the day I left to go to college.”
And that’s what makes Woods’ story interesting. He wanted to come home and try to tackle the problems of his old school district.
Aliquippa’s grand tradition in football is well-known (a record 13 consecutive trips to a WPIAL championship) and has been well-documented. Aliquippa football excites him and he plans on attending numerous practices and games. But his time will be mostly consumed running a school district that has had declining enrollment (only 39 students were in the 2021 graduating class) and regularly scores low on standardized tests. The closing of the steel mills destroyed the town decades ago and crime can hit hard in this Beaver County town. For example, Antonyo “Sonny” Anderson was to be one of Aliquippa’s top receivers this season, but will not play after being shot in the back while driving his car in May.
Woods was a Quip almost three decades ago, good enough to play on a state championship team and also earn “The Shoe,” a bronze shoe given annually to Aliquippa’s team MVP. He’s proud of that shoe, which he
keeps along with his black Aliquippa helmet in his house in Freedom (Beaver County).
Woods grew up in a single-parent home in the projects of Aliquippa, used football to get out of Aliquippa, had a nice college career, got a master’s degree, a doctorate, worked in education administration in other school districts — and then came back to Aliquippa.
Woods knows all about the pitfalls of Aliquippa. He lived through some of them. But he is filled with eagerness to bring about change and help in what he calls “the revitalization of Aliquippa.” And as Aliquippa football coach Mike Warfield said, Woods’ hiring is a tremendous shot in the arm for Aliquippa youth — athletes or not.
“He’s somebody who has been here, played here and played at a pretty high level after high school,” Warfield said. “That’s what kids can relate to. For someone like him, with the way he grew up, to be as successful as he is, and want to come back here to be superintendent, that’s priceless for these kids to see.”
How many superintendents in Western Pennsylvania are working at the school where they were a football standout?
“I don’t want to say I want to be a role model. That’s Ty Law,” Woods said of the former Aliquippa star who is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and a friend of Woods. “Kids say they want to be Ty Law or Sean Gilbert (another former Aliquippa player who made the NFL). That’s OK. I want people to look at me as a homegrown product, but as a product of a village. The whole town helped raise me.
“I want to be more of an inspiration. I want to share my experiences and my knowledge. My goal is to lead by example, not just for the kids but for the staff and parents. … The fact that I was able to come out and make something of myself, a lot of people are shocked, to be honest. I was a little bit of a terror when I was younger, but I grew out of it and did it with a lot of love and support from this school district. That’s why I’m so driven about this school district.”
Woods is a 1994 Aliquippa graduate who, as a linebacker, led the team in tackles (134) as a senior. As a sophomore, he was a starter for much of the season on a team that won the PIAA Class 2A title and featured Law.
“He’s the best linebacker I’ve had,” former Aliquippa coach Frank Marocco said in a 1994 Post-Gazette story.
After high school, Woods played a few years at Youngstown State, where he was part of an NCAA Division I-AA national championship team. He then transferred to IUP, where he had two excellent seasons, and then played some arena football.
Along the way, Woods got his degrees and certification to be a principal and eventually a superintendent. He worked in administration at West Mifflin and Penn Hills, among other places. Before coming to Aliquippa, he was the high school principal at Woodland Hills.
“I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself because I still haven’t met all the teachers and been in classrooms,” Woods said. “But what I can look at is data showing we’re lacking in our core content in the classroom. We have to make sure our curriculum is aligned. We have to look at our supplemental resources and then we have to look at how we’re delivering instruction.
“What I see as one of the biggest problems is we spend millions of dollars on out-of-district tuition because our families are sending their kids to, maybe, charter schools because they feel we’re not efficient enough. And we have to pay for them.”
Woods believes there is revitalization going on right now in Aliquippa. Last week, he attended an event in Aliquippa where Gov. Tom Wolf attended and promoted the fact that Aliquippa has received more than $11 million in state funding to encourage business development that will, among other things, benefit families.
“Because we’re so successful in football people think that’s the only thing we care about,” Woods said. “Someone who has that opinion just doesn’t know. Our school buildings are new. I was there while Gov. Wolf was going over the revitalization plan.
“I think I was successful at Woodland Hills and did a lot of good things that no one knew about. That’s the same with Aliquippa. There’s more to Aliquippa than football, violence and poverty. There is a plethora of goodness that gets overshadowed. It’s going to be my ministry to share what Aliquippa has to offer. I can’t donate millions of dollars and maybe I can’t lead the revitalization, but I can help.”
The Aliquippa football players already are aware of Woods.
“I’ve never seen a superintendent at practice,” said Neco Eberhardt, a standout junior lineman. “It’s surprising. We see that he made something of himself.”
Woods wants to make more of Aliquippa, though, in more things than football.
“Never count an Aliquippa guy out of the race,” he said. “We do not understand quit, defeat or loss. We know we have to deal with it, but we don’t settle for it. It’s just the way we’re wired.”
Woods already has done his share of winning — on and off the field.