“It was just a great honor to get something like this after all of the years,” said De Felicis, 81, who resides in Ventura. “It was also great to be back with some of the guys I played with on the same team in the [1940s].”
Long before he touched the lives of thousands of young athletes in Burbank with his coaching exploits, De Felicis was quite an accomplished athlete in his own right during his youth.
As a high school player, De Felicis helped anchor one of the most storied teams in the history of Pennsylvania football.
In the 1944-45 season, his Donora High Dragons team won the Pennsylvania state championship and finished the season with a sparkling 9-0 record.
“That was a great team. We had some very good players on that team,” De Felicis said. “We had some guys who went on to play in college and in the pros.
“We used to go both ways back then, playing offense and defense. We had to play for almost the whole game. But we loved it. We loved playing football.”
In 1984, readers of the Pittsburgh Press newspaper voted the 1945 Dragon football team the best high school football team in the history of Western Pennsylvania.
That season, Dragons won the school’s second consecutive WPIAL championship and had their second straight undefeated season.
Donora culminated its season with a 38-6 victory against Kensington in the title game at St. Vincent College in Latrobe.
Coached by Jim Russell, the Dragons allowed just seven points during the season, while scoring 259 for a per-game average of 28.8 points.
Donora experienced its closest margin of victory in a 7-0 win against Clairton.
“They really couldn’t stop us — we were that good,” De Felicis said.
De Felicis was a star running back on the Dragons team that was overflowing with talent.
