Villanova Univeristy Athletics

A native of New Kensington, Pa., Louis “Louie” Pessolano played for Villanova from 1925-28.  He graduated in 1929 and was inducted to the Varsity Club Hall of Fame in 1980.  Pessolano played tackle and was a team captain for the 1928 season.
 
Pessolano was a member of the first four Villanova teams coached by Harry Stuhldreher, an eventual College Football Hall of Famer who had been one of the famous “Four Horsemen” of the Notre Dame backfield as a quarterback during his own collegiate career.  Stuhldreher began an 11-year run as Villanova head coach immediately after graduating from Notre Dame.
 
The teams that Pessolano was a part of went 25-5-3 (.803) during his career, including an unbeaten season in 1928 when Villanova tallied a 7-0-1 record.  That year came in the midst of a an 18-game unbeaten streak (16-0-2) which began with the fourth game of the 1927 campaign and continued until the seventh game of the 1929 season.
 
An article on football written by Stuhldreher was published in the Modesto Bee and News-Herald on October 28, 1928, and in a section of the article Stuhldreher wrote “One of the greatest tackles I have ever seen is Lou Pessolano, captain of this year’s Villanova eleven.  He is one of dozens of small college players who are just as great as the All-America selections but are not nationally known because they perform far from mammoth stadiums and spacious press boxes where sporting writers, the real molders of public opinion, send columns and columns of descriptive matter to all parts of the country.  A small college man has to be twice as good as a university player to get equal recognition.”
 
Following his collegiate career, Pessolano played one season in the NFL for the Staten Island Stapletons in 1929.  He appeared in three games with one start for a Staten Island team which went 3-4-3 during the 1929 campaign.
 
The graduation year of 1929 is the earliest for any Varsity Club Hall of Fame inductee, and Pessolano is one of two athletes from that class to become a Hall of Famer.  The other is former men’s basketball player and longtime head coach Al Severance, who was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 1974 in recognition of his accomplishments during 25 years as the Wildcats head coach (1936-61).