Wood, 81, got the most out of Dieruff players
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Dieruff High School produced its share of quality of talented running backs who carried the program to lots of success.
Mark Howard, Tony Jordan, Dave Kurisco and Kevin Easterling are just of the few Husky backs to find plenty of daylight.
There was also a scrawny kid named Andre Reed who went from quarterback at Dieruff to one of the best wide receivers in pro football history.
One of the guys who brought the best out in them was Bill Wood.
As a Dieruff assistant and teacher for 30 years, Wood became a part of the fabric of the east Allentown school, bringing toughess to countless Husky athletes.
Wood died on Thursday at the age of 81.
“Bill always inspired me to work hard and leave it all on the field,” Reed said on Facebook. “His voice and … attention to detail taught me a lot about myself and my ability.”
He said that seeing Wood and several other Dieruff coaches was among the highlights of his Hall of Fame induction weekend at Canton in 2014.
Wood was known as “Billy the Jet” because he spent the 1963 season with the pro football team. It was the Jets’ first season with that nickname after being known previously as the Titans.
The 1957 Allentown High graduate was fresh off an outstanding collegiate career as a running back at West Virginia Wesleyan and spent most of the 1963 season on the Jets taxi squad before getting in
the regular-season finale against the Chiefs.
After injuries kept him out of action in 1964, he attempted a return to the Jets in 1965, but was politely told by Coach Weeb Ewbank that even though they saw “good potential” in Wood, there were no roster spots available.
When John “Jeep” Bednarik, brother of Eagles legend Chuck Bednarik, took over as Dieruff ’s head coach in 1967, he added Wood to his staff.
Wood became synonymous with Dieruff football for the next three decades and got the most out of his players.
“He made the average player good and the good player great,” said Parkland superintendent Rich Sniscak, who was the quarterback on
Dieruff ’s undefeated team in 1979. “His attention to detail was unmatched from demanding the correct steps and carrying the ball in the correct hand for running backs to running with proper form. He wanted perfection on the practice field.”
Hall of Fame coach Bruce Trotter loved having Wood on his staffs.
“He was the first one to say that you needed speed to be successful,” Trotter said. “We had tough kids. We didn’t have a lot of finesse, but Bill emphasized making them fast. He was a stickler. He could get on their backs pretty good and I know he taught Andre a lot about running. Billy coached Andre in track and you could see him getting faster and faster. We did a drill called jingle jangles and it promoted unity because if one guy missed something, everybody had to do it again.”
Trotter said the speed conditioning changed the culture of Dieruff football along with the mental toughness instilled.
“Billy took a lot of pride in the offensive backs,” Trotter said. “We thought we could control the game with our running game and Bill was a big part of that.”
“He would demand toughness from his players, which was the Dieruff brand,” Sniscak said. “As an educator, he was professional at all times. He supported students in and out of the classroom. For us who had the pleasure of calling him a friend, one could not find a more caring man.”
He was very popular, too, as former Allen basketball standout and current Parkland athletic director Bill Dreisbach found out when he attended West Virginia Wesleyan in the early 1980s.
“I was on campus for maybe two days and Kent Carpenter, the school’s football coach at the time, sought me out because he saw where I was from,” Dreisbach said. “He had been a teammate of Bill Wood and as soon as he figured out I knew him, he went off with all kinds of great stories, most of which are not fit for print. Carpenter told me what a great guy he was and obviously, a great football player, too.”
Carpenter then became West Virginia Wesleyan’s athletic director and thanks in part to the Wood connection, Dreisbach and Carpenter had a good relationship throughout the former Canary’s four years on campus.
Then when Dreisbach came back to the Lehigh Valley, Wood would engage him on all things about their college.
“He would ask me about this guy and that guy,” Dreisbach said. “We became friends from that even though I didn’t know a lot about him until I got down there.”
Trotter said that with Wood, there was no sugarcoating.
“He told it like it was,” Trotter said. “Sometimes I had to scold him because he’d tell the kids that this team wasn’t as good as that team and so on. I wanted to keep the kids pumped up for everyone, not just a rival like Whitehall. But he was great for the program, great for kids. If a kid had natural talent, he took that talent and made that kid even better.”