“There are some things I know that people don’t know about him, like the significance of his faith,” Becky Stasavich says about her late father, East Carolina coaching great Clarence Stasavich. Another thing most people don’t knew about the man who brought big-time college football to Greenville, she says, is that he insisted on being able to walk to work. For many years he and his family lived in a home on Rock Spring Road almost in sight of the new football stadium the college built for him. Stasavich died in 1975 but in one important way he never left that home just off 14th Street a block from College Hill. His papers and effects where there when Becky, the oldest, moved to Greenville in 1980 to be a companion to her mother, who died in 1997. The books and memorabilia were still there when Mary Helen, the middle child, after teaching overseas for more than 30 years, retired there in 2001. Son Walter, the youngest, grew up here and later was Greenville’s director of parks and recreation; he developed River Park North, where the science center is named for him. He died in 1993. Walter’s two daughters, Laura Elizabeth ’92 ’98 of Wilmington and Sarah Catherine ’99 of Greenville, are alumnae. Becky and Mary Helen recently donated Coach Stas’ library of football books, letters home during World War II, memorabilia, correspondence, awards and other personal effects to East Carolina. The material will make up the core of the new Clarence Stasavich Collection housed in University Archives. “Acquiring the records of someone so intimately involved with the growth of East Carolina athletics will serve to allow researchers and fans to more accurately chronicle the history of the Pirates and the venues in which they performed,” said ECU Archivist Arthur Carlson ’07. At the time he retired from the sidelines in 1969 to become athletic director, Stasavich was the third-winningest coach in America.
University Archives
Daughters donate Coach Stas’ library
Coach Stas Highlight Reel Overall record of 170–64–8, including 16 seasons at Lenoir-Rhyne. He was 50–27–1 at East Carolina. Won seven consecutive Carolinas Conference championships at Lenoir-Rhyne NAIA small college national coach of the year, 1959; won the NAIA national championship in 1960. When he left coaching he trailed only Alabama’s Bear Bryant and Mississippi’s John Vaught in total victories. Led East Carolina out of the small-college NAIA and into membership in the Southern Conference of the NCAA. Pirate teams had three consecutive 9–1 seasons and won three consecutive bowl games. As athletics director, presided over fundraising and construction of Minges Coliseum, Scales Field House, Harrington Field and Bunting Field.
Everyone seemed to know him. Mary Helen recalls passing through an airport far away from home many years ago, and the official inspecting her passport glanced up excitedly and asked if she was related to the Coach Stas who ran the famous single-wing offense. Becky graduated from Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., the year her father became the East Carolina football coach. She completed her master’s degree at ECU in 1967. Mary Helen graduated from Lenoir-Rhyne while her father was coaching and teaching there. She was a cheerleader at Lenoir-Rhyne the last year her father coached there. Her dad’s L-R
squad was playing East Carolina late in the season and a rabid Pirate fan started yelling at Coach Stas. “Some guy came up to the sidelines yelling, ‘we’re going to kill you Stas.’ He kept on and one. So I turned around and said, ‘That’s my dad!’ Later when Dad told us he was coming down here to coach, I said, ‘I don’t think they like you much down there.’” Luckily, she was wrong about that. He became so revered that days after he died, an inspired East Carolina team—urged to win one for Coach Stas—traveled to Chapel Hill and pulled off a stunning 38-17 upset for the school’s first victory over a Carolina team. 15