Longtime official, coach Rich Alsberry remembered for impact in high school sports

By: Charles Curti
Monday, September 9, 2024 | 12:01 AM

Previous Next

Paul Sapotichne didn’t speak to Rich Alsberry for two years.

That seems odd considering the long-time coach and long-time referee spent a large part of their adult lives as fast friends. But when each was in the early years of his craft, an in-game spat triggered two years of silence.

Sapotichne, who was coaching the Greensburg Salem boys basketball team at the time, disputed a call Alsberry made as the trailing official. The coach called it “the worst call I’ve ever seen in my life.”

So for two years after that, Sapotichne refused to speak with Alsberry. But as time went on, and Alsberry worked more of Sapotichne’s games, the coach began to see the quality of Alsberry’s officiating and, perhaps more importantly, the quality of his character.

“I think he was a gentleman,” Sapotichne said. “He could be tough, but he was a gentleman in how he acted. I rarely saw him raise his voice. He understood the game. He understood that coaches on both sides are biased.

“He was going to make the best call he could, be in the best position he could, and if it started to get into a (heated) situation, he could defuse it.”

Alsberry died Aug. 24, eight days after turning 73. He had spent 47 years as a basketball referee, working at the high school and college levels. Later, he coached the Riverview ninth-grade boys team, going undefeated in his final season last winter.

A group of his players from Riverview spoke at his funeral Aug. 30.

“Just to hear everything that they had to say about him, I think he had a bigger impact on them than he probably even thought,” said Alsberry’s daughter, Renee Richardson.

Sports always had been important in Alsberry’s life, from being a three-year letterman in basketball and baseball at South Hills High School to an all-conference second baseman at North Carolina Wesleyan to a brief stint in minor-league baseball.

When his playing days were over, he turned to officiating as a way to remain involved. In addition to being a basketball referee, while living in Vandergrift, he also became an umpire, working everything from Little League to American Legion for more than 30 years.

Sapotichne said Alsberry had the perfect demeanor for the job.

“He would kind of lean into you a little bit and give you like a side-eye look and say something like, ‘Coach, OK, easy. I understand,’ ” Sapotichne said. “ ‘I had a real good angle, but I’ll tell you what: I will watch real closely next time to make sure I don’t miss that.’

“I would turn to my coaching staff, and I would go, ‘I hate when he does that!’ Because now I can no longer yell.”

If the coaches weren’t yelling, the fans were, and Richardson had to endure the barbs directed toward her father, whether it was during one of her sons’ basketball games or a random event she would attend while he was officiating. She frequently did that to support him.

And at games her father wasn’t working, she often would talk to the referees afterward to see if they knew him.

“I always felt so proud,” she said. “… I knew what kind of reputation he had that anybody that knew my dad would have something nice to say about him.”

For all he accomplished as an athlete and an official — Alsberry is a member of the Pittsburgh Basketball Club Hall of Fame and the South Hills High School Alumni Association’s Sports Hall of Fame — coaching might have meant just as much.

Late in his career as a basketball official, Alsberry and his crew showed up to work a Riverview boys game. Sapotichne said he overheard Alsberry telling a fellow official he had never been asked to coach at the WPIAL level.

He had experience volunteering as a coach in the Connie Hawkins and Ozanam summer leagues in Pittsburgh, but he never had been part of a school’s coaching staff. The pangs to coach were becoming greater at that point because after four decades as a referee, Richardson said, running up and down the court was becoming difficult.

Sapotichne needed a ninth-grade coach, so he called Alsberry later that night and hired him. Alsberry’s work with the ninth-grade team helped the Raiders prosper at the varsity level during Sapotichne’s final seasons before his retirement in 2021.

Richardson said among the keepsakes of her father, which includes official jerseys and whistles, she has pictures of him coaching. Like she did while he was an official, she would make it a point to go and watch games he coached.

And as with officiating, Richardson said, coaching was another way her father could have an impact on youth. That, she said, was his greatest joy.

“I think he enjoyed being out there with the players,” she said. “He wasn’t out there just to call a game. He was mentoring them and helping them to go in the right direction.”

Tags: Greensburg Salem, Plum, Riverview