Editor’s note: Today is the second in a series of articles profiling the 2015 Norwich High School Sports Hall of Fame induction class.
<em>By Tom Rowe
Contributing Writer</em>
In 1965 Sam Elia was completing his 19th and final season as Norwich High School’s highly-successful wrestling coach, and he still had more than 10 years left mentoring the Purple’s golf team in addition to overseeing the school’s whole gamut of sports as Athletic Director. And during that same halcyon year of 1965 a young British lad by the name of Ray Davies was penning the Top 20 hit “A Well Respected Man” for his quartet The Kinks. Although the song was a satirical look at the lives of well-heeled Brits, its title fit Samuel Francis Elia to a tee.
“He was a great coach, knew his stuff and gave it his all,” said Don Manley, who wrestled under Elia from 1953-57, compiling a gaudy 67-2 record, and who, himself, was recently elected last year to the Norwich High School Sports Hall of Fame. “But, more importantly, he was the perfect role model, and that was scarce. He may have been the only role mode I had as a young fellow.”
Elia, who graduated from Norwich in 1932, lettered in golf, as well as playing football, basketball and baseball his senior year. Class statistics in the school yearbook listed his amusement as being gallant, and his ambition to be a Notre Dame star. Well, he headed west after graduation but to LaCrosse State College in Wisconsin, rather than to Fighting Irish territory. There at LaCrosse, he not only graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physical Education, but met the love of his life Dorothy Ranallo. Married in 1940, they remained in the Midwest while Sam took graduate courses at the University of Minnesota. Two years later, they returned to Norwich, where Sam began his livelihood in teaching. But World War II put a quick stop to that career and he spent three years in the Air Force before resuming his life in Norwich in 1946.
It was then that Elia assumed the reins of the Tornado wrestling program, taking over from Frank Giltner, who had inaugurated the program some 11 years hence. And in his very first season, without any wrestling experience behind him, Elia demonstrated the flair that would be his trademark for the next two decades as the Purple posted a 9-1 dual meet record en route to the Section 4 championship. The two of them will be honored posthumously on Sept. 20 in Syracuse with their induction into the Upstate New York Chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
“At that time, there were three pockets of wrestling in New York State – Long Island, the Watertown/Gouverneur area and Section 4,” noted longtime mat coach Jim Howard, who coached at Windsor in the 1960s, was the head honcho at Oswego State for 26 years and is a member of both the National Wrestling Hall of Fame as well as the New York State Wrestling Hall Of Fame. “And, Sam Elia was at the forefront in helping Section 4 become what it is today. He cared about the well-being of every athlete he ever touched and the entire Section 4 wrestling community. He was not in the game to ‘win them all’ but rather he wanted results that were better than the last time with no excuses.”
But while Elia was at the forefront in the early days of Section 4 wrestling, his tenure there was short-lived as Norwich, which had been searching for a league with a solid base in all sports, opted to join the Iroquois League at the start of the 1952-’53 school year. Based in Section 3, the new alliance featured six schools – Norwich, Herkimer, Ilion, Little Falls, Mohawk and Oneonta. And the Elia-led Tornado quickly adapted to their new surroundings, capturing the first seven Iroquois team championships.
During that seven-year run, Norwich compiled a 61-9-3 record, going undefeated at 10-0 on three occasions in 1952-’53, 1954-’55 and 1955-’56. During a good part of those undefeated campaigns, Norwich ran off an impressive 29-match win streak that finally ended in 1957 when Ilion trimmed the Purple 24-18.
In addition to those seven consecutive league titles, the Purple matmen also raised the flag on two Section 3 championships in 1955-’56 and 1958-’59, the latter being one of the more improbable as Norwich sported only a 6-4-1 log in dual meet activity that season. And five other times, the Tornado finished runners-up in the section, usually to Watertown as there was no differentiation of classes then. All told, Elia racked up a record of 122-54-5 (.693) as head of the NHS mat brigade.
