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Westminster staff coaching up Valley talent
Siroki, assistant coaches mine Valley for Westminster hoops talent
By CHARLES GROVE
NEW WILMINGTON, PA.
Just across the border in New Wilmington, Pa., Westminster College men’s basketball head coach Kevin Siroki is building up expectations with a coaching staff and roster loaded with Mahoning Valley talent.
Westminster finished its season last month with a 10-18 record, but caught fire in February. The Titans won five of their last six games, propelling them into a conference championship final which they narrowly lost 70-65 to top-seeded Saint Vincent.
The squad contains four players from the immediate area in Jarret Vrabel (Canfield), AJ Grant (Warrem JFK), Paolo DePasquale (Lowellville) and Deontay Scott (East), while Cameron Pozsgai is from just west in Windham. And that core is about to be “instrumental” for his team the next two years, according to Siroki.
The coaching staff is largely made up from the Youngstown area as well. Siroki hails from Mineral Ridge while assistant coach Jim Stitt, principal of Market Street Elementary School in Boardman, is originally from McDonald. Assistant coach Chivas Whipple is from Youngstown.
Siroki says those connections he and his staff have been able to create with the area’s high school coaches have been vital to stockpiling talent from just across the Ohio border.
“We know a lot of high school coaches in this area,” Siroki said. “A lot of them are our good friends. And if they don’t know me they’re going to know one of the other assistants and I think because of those connections we’ve gotten some great players from the area so far.”
Stitt commented that the Mahoning Valley is a great area for a Division III team to recruit saying there’s a large talent pool of smaller-school quality college players.
“Size-wise and skill-wise there’s a lot of Division III athletes in this area,” Stitt said. “We get a lot of kids that want to continue their playing career and at our level you’ve got to really love the game because there’s no athletic scholarship coming.”
When you listen to the coaches rattle off the attributes for each of the area players the words “hard-nosed” and “work ethic” come up time and time again, which is critical for Division III athletes who can’t have any basketball contact with their coaches from season’s end until Oct. 15. Stitt says that’s a testament to talent from this area and used Grant as an example.
“AJ didn’t even start for his high school team,” Stitt said. “But he’s probably one of the best athletes in the league. There were other kids from JFK we were recruiting and we didn’t get to see him play that often but we knew he was athletic. He got into the gym during the fall and then during practices throughout the season he put in a lot of time. Even during the day he’d come down to the gym just to work skill-wise with Coach Chivas.”
During Siroki’s time as a point guard for Westminster, the Titans went 78-29 from 1990-93. That benchmark for success is where both Siroki and Stitt think the program is headed with the help of their Valley talent.
“We’re right where we need to be,” Siroki said. “We’re starting to get back to that winning tradition since we finished this season up strong.”
“We did make a good little run,” Stitt said. “One of our goals was to get to the final four of our conference tournament and we reached that goal before giving the No. 1 team a run, up five with about six minutes to go. I think there are good things to come in the future.”