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[QUOTE="OrangePA, post: 89967, member: 204"]
Al Merola.

It's really hard for me to believe that given my young age at the time, Al Merola could play such a major part in my life and my enduring love for sports.

I met him when I was in second grade at Manlius Elementary. He was a young student intern at the time.

He became our gym coach the following year at Pleasant Street School in Manlius.

For the next three years he not only taught us football, basketball, soccer etc, but at recess every day in the winter played "grab" football with us outside in the snow. Mr. Merola would play QB for the two teams of third through fifth graders. He ran a number of different offenses, including the wishbone when Darrel Royal introduced it that year at Texas.

I never had more fun in my life.

When I was in fifth grade he used to ask a few of us to play basketball with him and some high school students in the old Pleasant Street gym after class. He treated us as adults - we were nine years old! - and we loved it all.

He left to become the Solvay football coach when I was in sixth grade. The guy who replaced him was a decent teacher but nothing like what we had with Mr. Merola - school was never quite the same.

I never had a chance to meet up with him as an adult or even as a high school student. I always figured I would and always imagined that he would remember all of us at FM.

Again, it's hard to believe that one can be so influenced by a guy at such a young age, but that's what happened with me with Mr. Merola.

And it's hard to believe that a person could be so good and so much better than anybody else as a gym coach, but Mr. Merola was just that.

He was a true craftsman at his trade and I'll never forget him.
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