ALIQUIPPA, Pa. — There is a quote etched on the front of my son’s former elementary school: “It may make a difference to all eternity whether we do right or wrong today.”

Those words were written over 150 years ago by theologian James Freeman Clarke, a fearless New Hampshire native who advocated for the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and prison reform. I have always marveled at the wisdom in those words, still some 30 years after I first read them when walking my 6-year-old into his first day of school.

Doing and saying the right thing has enormous impact. It is the greatest gift you can give to anyone you come into contact with, and they will pass on that good turn, on and on, as Freeman Clarke said, impacting lives into perpetuity.

Michael Warfield — Coach Mike Warfield to those who follow Aliquippa High School football — is a man who did the right thing two weeks ago when his undefeated team sat on the bench with heads down, some players in tears, as the final seconds ticked off the state championship clock. He told them to get off of the bench and handle their defeat with dignity.

“You a man when you win, you a man when you lose,” Mr. Warfield said to his team in that moment.

He then walked to the middle of the field with a broad smile and tipped his hat to the Bishop McDevitt team that had defeated his kids — the same team the Quips defeated last year for the state championship. He then told Post-Gazette reporter Mike White that he was in pretty good spirits because he recognized his team had lost to a worthy opponent.

“That is a pretty good team,” Coach Warfield said. “The kids did the best they could. We ain’t making no excuses. We ain’t bringing nothing other than we got to give them credit. . . . I tip my hat to the coach, and to his staff, and his players: They set a goal. It is a great thing to see young people come together collectively and work towards that goal and they did it today.”

In that moment, Mr. Warfield said and did something that his players — once the sting of losing fades — will likely never forget. He showed them how to lose with grace.

He hopes they will take that with them into whatever they do in life, not just in sports.

Mr. Warfield said what he wanted his players to hear from him — what he wanted them to understand — is that the other team earned that win, and that they should respect that effort: “They set goals, and they wanted to rematch and beat us, and they put their heads down and they worked towards it.”

“Nothing was given to them. They couldn’t buy it. They had to work for it — and that’s a lesson, even though it cost us a win,” he said. “But it’s a great story for [Aliquippa], which is a great story in general for any kid, that ‘Okay, they beat us this year, but we are going to work hard towards beating them next year.’ And they did it. So, I was happy for them. At the same time, I was a little disappointed for our kids,” he said.

“There is so much in athletics, especially high school athletics, I don’t like at times, because it divides us so much and it separates us so much — just based off on the colors that we wear — and causes us not to come together collectively, which we should,” he said.

If you are not a fan of football or think what Mr. Warfield did is trivial, think about it more deeply: He is coaching a legendary football program, one that has included giants like Mike Ditka, one that has punched above its weight long after the foundations of this Beaver County city crumbled after LTV Steel closed for good in 1984.

Outside of a handful of churches, what holds this city together is the football team: People schedule their Fridays around whether or not the team is playing at home. Quips football is the one of the few things that makes people here feel as though they are part of something bigger than themselves.

On the day the team left for the state championship, elementary school students, parents, community members, former players and first responders all lined up to cheer them on — holding up homemade signs — as the bus rolled out of town.

Once upon a time, Aliquippa had a lot more to celebrate. Until the 1970s, it was a bustling city of 20,000, where half the town worked at the steel mill and the other half worked in the small businesses on Franklin Avenue that supported the steel industry.

Today it is fair to say that Franklin Avenue has seen better days. The city’s population is 9,000 — 39% Black and 58% white — with many living below the poverty line. The school district’s enrollment is nearly 80% Black.

Mr. Warfield said despite the losses, it is also a city filled with people who refuse to give up hope.

He played for the Quips — at quarterback no less — 30 years ago — and went on to play in college and then in Germany. He earned a degree in sociology, came back to the area and began his career in law enforcement. He began as a state trooper in 1993, working on turnpike patrol until 1999, before joining to the state police Bureau of Drug Law Enforcement in Belle Vernon, where he covered five counties in southwestern Pennsylvania investigating violent drug trafficking gangs.

When he took the job as head football coach in 2018 — the first Black coach to guide the winningest program in western Pennsylvania — he said he walked into a locker room that was in decay and a stadium where half the stands had been condemned.

“I knew when I took this job it was to teach these young men not just to do their best on the field, but to also to live their young lives with intention, with purpose — not just when we win, but also when we lose,” he said.

Mr. Warfield says he knows that things could have gone very differently had he not had people in his life who taught him there were consequences for every decision he made: people like his mother, who also taught him about leading a purpose-driven life.

“I grew up in Aliquippa with my mother — a single mom. We lived in the Linmar Terrace projects all of my life, didn’t leave until I got on the state police when I was 24,” he said.

Mr. Warfield said he saw how hard his mother worked to make sure he had a roof over his head and food on the table. It was an example of sacrifice and grit that taught him early on that it would crush her if he made any bad moves with his school work or in his free time.

“I think my initial motivation as a teenager growing up was not to disrespect my mom. I never wanted no one to go to my mama and say, ‘Mike is out there in the streets,’” he said. His mother still calls Aliquippa home.

“I tell you what,” Warfield said. “I’m still a young head coach too, so there’s a lot of things I have to learn and do better, but I learned more in losing than I had in winning, and that’s what I was trying to express to the kids after we lost the state championship. . . . Maybe you don’t understand it now at your age, but you’re going to look back on this loss and learn more from that loss than any championship you ever win.”

North Side native Salena Zito is a national political reporter for The Washington Examiner, a New York Post columnist and co-author of “The Great Revolt”: zito.salena@gmail.com.

First Published: December 25, 2022, 5:00 a.m.