Remember When: Female teacher coached 1943 high school football team at Bell Township

It was 1943, and World War II was raging.

Thousands of Alle-Kiski Valley troops were away from home, fighting battles in Europe and in the Pacific.

Locally, at Bell Township High School, all of the male teachers were serving in the military.

As the high school football season approached, about 35 boys harbored hopes of playing on the football team.

But there was one problem — no coach.

Prior to 1979, only faculty members from a school could coach a team. With the boys still wanting to play football, principal Quentin Kintigh summoned Pauline Rugh Smith to his office.

He asked the young English and physical education teacher if she would coach the football team. If not, the team would be disbanded.

“And for no explainable reason, I answered ‘yes,’ ” Rugh Smith said in a 1999 Valley News Dispatch interview.

Rugh Smith, then 23, had just graduated from Penn State. In preparation for her new role, she paid a visit to State College and met with the Nittany Lions’ football coach, Bob Higgins, who gave her some pages from the playbook to get started.

Meanwhile, the boys didn’t mind having a woman coaching — they just wanted to play football.

Soon, the story of this female football coach spread across the country.

One day, Rugh Smith returned to the family farm from practice and a crew from Look Magazine was in the driveway to do a story on her. At the time, radio and weekly magazines were the main sources of national and international news.

Lowell Thomas, a nationally known radio commentator of the era, also did a feature on the woman coaching football from Western Pennsylvania on what we might call a podcast today.

Photographers from all three Pittsburgh newspapers ventured out to Salina to do stories on Rugh Smith.

But despite all the publicity regarding the unique situation, Bell Township failed to win a game that season. The closest the Lions came was a 13-7 loss against Derry Township.

“I told my husband, ‘I guess the other coaches would be ostracized if they had lost to a woman,’ ” Rugh Smith said during her 1999 Alle-Kiski Valley Sports Hall of Fame induction speech.

By 1944, some of the male teachers returned home and to coaching.

But that’s not the end of the story. Because Bell had maintained its football program during the war years, the Lions ran off a 28-game winning streak from 1948 through the end of the 1951 season, to this day an A-K Valley record.

A number of schools, such as Elders Ridge and Franklin Township, shut down their football programs during World War II and later found it hard to regenerate their programs.

Because of the WPIAL rules of the day, even with undefeated teams, Bell couldn’t accumulate enough Gardner System ratings points to be considered for a WPIAL title game.

By 1952, Avonmore had joined forces with Bell Township to form Bell Avon High School.

In 1962, Bell Avon was dissolved to help form the Kiski Area School District.

Rugh Smith had become a guidance counselor by then, retiring in 1972.

She and her husband, Wenroy, wrote a series of farming instructional books.

In 1993, 15 players from the historic Bell team honored their former coach at a 50-year reunion.

Rugh Smith died in State College on July 3, 2009, at age 88.