Chuck Klausing, a legendary football coach who won six WPIAL football championships at old Braddock High School and also coached at district colleges, died Thursday night at St. Andrew’s Nursing Home in Indiana, Pa.
Klausing, 92, died of natural causes, according to his son, Tom.
Chuck Klausing spent half of his life coaching football, as a head coach and assistant on the high school and college levels, including stops at Pitt, Carnegie Mellon and West Virginia.
“He was an on-the-field coach for 46 years,” said Tom Klausing. “It was what he did.”
Klausing’s first job was at old Pitcairn High School in the WPIAL. The team had only around 20 players, so Klausing used to often put on pads and practice with the team. He then moved on to Braddock, where he created a dynasty. Braddock and Klausing were once the subject of a four-page Sports Illustrated feature. Braddock teams set a national high school record for the longest unbeaten streak, going 56 games without a loss. Klausing is the only coach in WPIAL history to win six consecutive championships (1954-59).
Klausing left Braddock to become the freshman coach at Rutgers University for one season. He was an assistant at West Point for three years before becoming the head coach at IUP, and then the assistant head coach at West Virginia University under Bobby Bowden.
After West Virgina, he was Carnegie Mellon’s head coach before spending one year as an assistant at Pitt under Mike Gottfried. He finished his career in 1993 as the head coach at Kiski School, a prep school in Saltsburg. In the last game Klausing ever coached, his grandson, Jeff Simmons, was his quarterback. On that November day of 1993, Kiski beat Shady Side Academy, 33-6, to win the Interstate Prep League championship.
As a head coach at Pitcairn, Braddock, IUP, Carnegie Mellon and Kiski, Klausing had a record of 237-69-9.
“When I think of my Dad’s career, it’s hard to sum up in a few words,” said Tom Klausing. “I know in the last days here I asked him what his best team was. He wouldn’t pick on. He wouldn’t pick one Braddock team over another. I’d ask him the best quarterback and he’d say he had so many.”
But back in 1993, after his final game at Kiski, Klausing was asked to name the best player he ever faced. He picked Tony Dorsett, the former Hopewell High School great who went on to win a Heisman Trophy at Pitt.
“But when I was at West Virginia, we stopped him pretty good once,” Klausing said days after his final game in 1993.
Klausing was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1998 and was inducted into the WPIAL Hall of Fame in 2008. He also is a member of several other halls of fame.
Tom Klausing said, “I know he was indebted to his assistant coaches. While he was a great coach, he always said he couldn’t have done it without his assistants.”
Klausing is survived by four children. Another daughter and his wife, Joann, preceded him in death. Funeral arrangements are not known at this time.
Mike White: mwhite@post-gazette.com and Twitter @mwhiteburgh
First Published: February 16, 2018, 1:06 a.m.
