Gridiron Greatness In America’s First Suburb

Forthcoming documentary chronicles ‘70s midget football juggernaut

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. So it went in Levittown circa 1971 and 1972, when the Red Devils, a 27-member traveling team of football players ranging from the ages of eight through 13, were busy compiling a 20-1 record as back-to-back champions of the L.I.M.F.L. (Long Island Midget Football League). The team’s dominance enabled them to outscored their opponents in a two-year span by a margin of 443-69.

Meanwhile, their fathers, many of whom were blue-collar laborers predominantly working as cops, firemen, construction workers and any mix of civil servant, were commuting to and from New York City as the Big Apple was entering rapid decay and declining quality of life. It’s a story filmmakers Douglas Scott Delaney and Gaille Pike are trying to capture via the forthcoming documentary The Devils You Knew. And while the initial impression of this project that’s been three years in the making might be of a bunch of old men reliving their tween glory days on the gridiron, Delaney knows there is a far bigger story here that he personally lived through.

“When I started this, people were saying no one gave a [damn] about kid’s football and they said why did I think people cared—because we had a good team?,” he said. “That’s a good point because there are teams in Texas that haven’t lost a game in 20 years. But this isn’t Texas—it’s New York in 1971. It was a special time, special place and special team.”
Overseeing this immensely successful program was a quartet of coaches—John Dybus, Rich Festante, Jim Tintle and Robert Perpall, the latter of whom would get inducted into the Nassau County High School Athletics Hall of Fame thanks his work with the Seaford School District football program that yielded a pair of Long Island Championships and eight Nassau County titles.

The Devils’ powerhouse reputation came from the fact that Levittown’s corner of the L.I.M.F.L. was able to draw from a wealth of willing and able aspiring young athletes fueled by the community’s age demographic, a fact Delaney reaffirmed during a recent visit with local historian Paul Manton.
“Manton said something fascinating which was in 1969, the age of the average Levittowner was 12,” Delaney said. “No other community in the world had that demographic. You were packed with kids and every kid played sports. And all their fathers coached sports. So the talent pool from Levittown was so enormous.”

The result was that roughly 300 kids were trying out for 27 spots on the Red Devils travel team. But rather than send the kids home who didn’t make the cut, Tintle and company divided those numbers into anywhere from six to nine town teams. Players were designated by age and weight, so you cold have a large 10-year-old playing up with 12-year-olds while a smaller 12-year-old might play with the 10-year-olds, ensuring there was a degree of fairness when the ensuing teams would play each other round robin style. The best team eventually played the travel team as part of that season’s All Star game. It was a way for the coaches to evaluate talent with what was an ad-hoc farm system.

And while 10-year-old Delaney didn’t make it past the first tryout (“I was devastated”), he did make it the following year. It was then that he discovered the secret sauce to the Red Devils’ gridiron dominance—a quartet of coaches that challenged their charges to rise to greatness via grueling practices, having them learn complex offensive and defensive packages and uncompromising discipline.
“At that time, we were running a pro-set, NFL offense at 11 that Coach Perpall brought into us with a thick playbook,” Delaney recalled. “Every other coach said us kids weren’t ready for this and he asked why not and why don’t we find out if they are or aren’t [up to the task]. We had skull sessions, drill sessions—repetition and rote. Basics. Basics. Basics. And I’m talking seriously about John Rogan, a quarterback doing a triple fake reverse, dropping back 15 yards and throwing a 50-yard pass and hitting a guy in stride into the end zone. Kids didn’t do that back then.”

For as dominant as Levittown was, there was stiff competition from other programs like Syosset and more specifically, Massapequa, a fact Delaney is proud of.
“Massapequa won’t talk to us because we beat ‘em,” he said with a grin. “Playing them was good for us because we only beat them by seven points—we beat everyone else by 40. Massapequa was a game. You win that game and you were something. They were the guys to beat. But we knocked them out and they still resent it, but I would too.”

The Red Devils took their dominance down south for a memorable tilt against the Maryland All-Stars that had the Long Islanders delivering a 54-0 beatdown. It once again came down to numbers.
“Every town had [a football program like ours],” Delaney explained. “If you think about the level of local competition at the time, Long Island would have been the 11th largest state in the country. If you’re the best on Long Island, I figure that’s a New Jersey State championship.”

Currently in production, The Devils You Knew is slated for release in October 2023, just in time for the football season with a screening slated for one of the Levittown high schools. With roughly 16 sit-down interviews slated for October of this year, Delaney and Pike came out from their Reading, KS home for a visit that included further research and a project fund raiser held at Mr. Beery’s in Bethpage on June 12. In addition to shooting footage and raising money and awareness for the film, the event served as a mini-reunion for these former players and their families 50 years after the fact. The resonance of this small window of time was especially apparent to Delaney five decades on.

“I saw 62-year-old men crying for a few minutes where they would stop, think of something and then turn around,” the filmmaker said. “To a man, they said they would go through walls for these [coaches]. It’s about the legacy of these four men—Festante, Tintle, Dybus and Perpall—who changed everybody’s lives. When you saw 13 62-year-old guys—a lot of us busted up—walk across that practice field that we’d not been on in 50 years—my cameraman said he got chills. He said he knew what I was doing and I said this was what it was about. That’s moving to me.”

Visit www.thedevilsyouknew.com or email fortysixtrap@gmail.com for more information about the film.