Murrysville speaker series will focus on Pittsburgh's sports history

Coaches are quick to explain that sports can help teach a young person about life.

And it’s not just a clichéd path to motivation.

“We talk about sports at the Heinz History Center in the way you’d expect, but also about its importance to understanding history,” said chief historian Anne Madarasz, one of three History Center officials who will be part of a free sports history speaker series this summer at the Murrysville Community Library.

“We really examine a lot of the stories we tell elsewhere in the museum through the lens of sports history,” Madarasz said. “If you’re talking about integration, gender, race — those are things we examine in the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum.”

Museum officials hosted a program last year featuring the surviving members of Major League Baseball’s first all-minority lineup, which happened to be the Pittsburgh Pirates, on Sept. 1, 1971.

“We looked at it more in-depth, about integration in baseball by not just African Americans but also Latino players, and what that meant,” Madarasz said. “Sports can be a way for a talented individual to not only succeed in spite of gender, race or ethnicity, but it can also be a harbinger for larger change in our society.

“The military and sports are some of the first places where you saw our society start to move more toward integration.”

As longtime Pittsburgh-area residents know, sports also can shape the identity of a region.

“For a long time, this was a major industrial center,” Madarasz said. “And as Pittsburgh’s identity as the world’s steel city was going away, the idea of the ‘City of Champions’ was rising, especially through the 1970s with Super Bowls, World Series — those things helped unite people and make them feel good about their city.”

Madarasz will host the third and final program of the library’s series, “Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum: What a Story We Have to Tell,” on Aug. 30. A program on June 22 will look at hockey history in the region dating to 1893, and a July 25 program will focus on baseball.

“It’s a way to discuss the larger issues of American life and society, and where sports kind of crosses over and helps tell those stories,” Madarasz said.

The presentations will be at 6 p.m. in the council chambers of the Murrysville municipal building, 4100 Sardis Road.

All programs are free to attend. Register online at MurrysvillePArecreation.com. For more information, call 724-327-2100, ext. 131.