10-16-2025 4:51am

Second Boyertown Area Senior High Soccer Coach Shares Long Ago Memory

Lesley Misko Editor

Recently, we published an article researched and written by Mike Strzelecki and titled Ice Cream Tour of Local Dairies Proves a Sweet Challenge. If you missed it, you can read it by clicking here.

Retired Boyertown Area Senior High Biology teacher Bob Ballantyne read the article and it brought back some good memories.

Ballantyne shares:

"In today's article by Mike about ice cream stores, I caught the reference to stopping at Longacre's 'after a particularly tough soccer practice.'

I was the head coach in the early years of the [soccer] program. We were low on skills but high on spirit and 'physical condition.' The players started to refer to practice as Ballantyne's boot camp.

Strez was promoted to varsity after his first JV game and played the varsity game which followed the JV game.

He thus played 8 straight quarters of soccer on a Saturday. He was a natural as a sweeper fullback.

His father, Paul Strezlecki, a teacher at the High School, cornered me Monday morning at the school with the question, 'What did you do to my son?'

The younger Stez played every quarter of every game every year he was in high school.

Incidentally I was not the first head coach. We started with two JV only seasons, and I came aboard the second season as assistant coach. The original head coach was not on the faculty and had to leave the position as a result a promotion. I thus was not the first head coach, but was the first varsity coach although the second head coach.

Bob Ballantyne"

Much appreciation to Bob for sharing this special memory!