On Friday, Oct. 29 at halftime of the Mineola football game at Hampton Stadium at 7 p.m., members of the 1983 Girls State Championship Softball team, lacrosse coach Bob Young and Rollie Stichweh from the Class of 1961 will be inducted into the Mineola Athletic Hall of Fame. Below is information about each recipient.
The 1983 Girls State Championship Softball team: The team record was 22-4. They won the State Championship final game with a 4 run rally in the bottom of the 7th inning to win 6-3 to earn their state title. The team was lead by Captains Lisa Petersen and Mary Beth Fenick and by All-County players Lisa Petersen and Cindy Dowback, All-Conference player ninth grader Laura Juliano, and All-League pitcher Sandy Dowback, who was the winning pitcher in 21 of the 24 games. They were a very team-orientated team as each player was an important part of each different victory.
Mineola Lacrosse Coach Bob Young: Young was a 1959 graduate and was a standout athlete at Mineola. He earned 11 varsity letters in three sports—four years of varsity basketball, four years of varsity football and three years of varsity lacrosse. He was an All-County quarterback on the football team. He was also an All-County lacrosse player where he was voted as the best attackman on Long Island in 1959. He went on to teach PE for 30 years at Mineola. He was the head varsity lacrosse coach for 18 years where he went on to win 170 games. His teams earned playoff berths almost every year of his coaching career. He coached the only two high-school All-American lacrosse players to come out of Mineola. Fifteen of the boys he coached went on to play for collegiate national championships—winning the majority of them. He also coached 13 boys that went on to be collegiate All-Americans, which was more than any coach in Mineola history.
Rollie Stichweh Class of 1961: Stichweh played on three Nassau County championship teams while at Mineola—the 1960 County basketball champions, the 1960 Nassau County Football Rutgers Cup Champions and the 1961 Nassau County Lacrosse Champions. He won the Thorpe Award as the best football player in Nassau County in 1961. He went on to become the starting quarterback for the West Point Black Knights where he was an honorable mention All-American. At that time, Army was a Division 1 College football team that played all the best colleges in the country. He also played in two of the greatest Army-Navy games of all time, losing to Navy (in front of a crowd of 102,000) lead by NFL Hall Of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach 21-15 in 1963. The game ended with Army on the two-yard line going in to score with two seconds remaining in a very controversial ending. Navy was the #2 ranked team in the country. During this season, Stichweh was a two-way starter playing quarterback and safety. Stichweh and Army then went on to win the 1964 game vs Navy and Roger Staubach 11-8. Stichweh went on to serve our country in Vietnam where he was a member of the 173rd Airborne Brigade where he received numerous awards including two for heroism under fire: the Bronze Star with “V” for valor and the Air Medal with “V” for valor.
—Information provided by Daniel Guido
