There were also newspaper articles and photos from the 1980s. A coin from Colonia’s first night football game. A play handwritten in red and black pen on green cardboard. Other memorabilia, and then some.
When Ben Lassala packed up his office recently, his 40-year career as a coach and administrator seemed to come alive with all the warm feelings, victories and friendships of a colorful career.
“Oh, yeah, I found some stuff,” he said. “It’s a nice memory. I can’t throw it away. People are always saying why did you get that, why did you get that. I kept it all.”
It certainly accumulates.
The colorful LaSala has long been a familiar presence on local athletic fields. He is one of the genuine people who make high school sports great – those who selflessly put in the long hours, those who shape and impact lives off the field, and who do it not for money or fame, but to give back to society.
He retired after his term as Colonia’s athletic director, concluding a 43-year career in education and coaching.
A New Jersey School Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductee, LaSala previously coached football, wrestling and softball and has served as Colonia’s AD for the past 11 years. He also served as a wrestling referee and was active on coaches associations and committees.
Of course, he will still help out and run tournaments in some way, but at 64, LaSala felt the time had come.
He recalled a conversation he had a year ago with Edison College athletic director Dave Sandal.
“He would ask, ‘So when are you planning on leaving?'” LaSala said. “I always said, ‘We’ll see what happens. We’ll see what happens.’ And then last June we had a great new principal, Chris Kiera, and we also have our former principal, Ken Pace, who retired. You couldn’t ask for better people. So I said I was going to try and give Kiera another year to get started and not have a new principal. I said, ‘I’ll file the paperwork. I’ll make it official.’
“… I thought I’d have more energy towards the end, but then I felt a real burnout come on, like in May of this year. I’d never felt anything like this before. So it was the right choice.”
It was time.
Game Student
LaSala has always led an active life, ever since he grew up in Elizabeth and played stickball with friends using a rubber ball and broomstick, then went on to play baseball and wrestling at Roselle Catholic (Class of 1977).
After wrestling at Keene, LaSala began his career as a physical education teacher and coach, serving as the varsity head coach in football (17 years), wrestling (19 years) and softball (9 years) for nearly 50 seasons, winning a total of 335 games.
He credited renowned wrestling coach Jerry Nisivosia with being his mentor when he first began coaching as an assistant at Elizabeth, and then went on to become head wrestling skipper at Woodbridge and then Colonia, where he helped turn around the program in both success and numbers.
“I had a lot of energy,” he said, “and I went out in the hallways with enthusiasm and developed kids. There weren’t any development programs at the time to develop a bunch of kids. I coached freshman football and developed a bunch of kids from there.”
LaSala coached Colonia’s football team for 17 seasons from 1995 to 2012, compiling a 98-77 record, winning the White Division three times and appearing in the playoffs nine times.
One thing is for sure: Lasala has never played football. No problem. To him, teaching is teaching, no matter what the endeavor.
“You don’t have to play to coach,” LaSala said. “You have to be a good teacher to coach. If you’re willing to learn, you can be a coach, and I did. I was lucky, I had people who were there to guide me.”
He started on the freshman football team at Elizabeth High School, where coach Bill von Bischofhausen “mentored me.” LaSala fell in love with the sport, soaking up everything he could from Mike Silento as an assistant at Woodbridge and then Patsy Barbato at Colonia.
In the days before easily accessible video, LaSala preferred to write out plays, and he said he spent “more time on them than I probably should have, because I was always worried that other guys were spending more time on them than I was.”
“I was one of those guys, a clinic freak,” Lasala says. “I studied a lot. People laugh at me. Back then there were football books and football DVDs, so I bought six boxes of football books. Now you can go online and just click. I became a football researcher.”
A new beginning
He utilized that mindset when he transitioned to athletic director.
“I can tell in two minutes who’s going to be a good coach,” he says. “I go in and look at their classroom. If I’m recruiting someone as a coach, I’ll do that. Their workspace and their classroom. If it’s messy and disorganized, they’re not going to be well-liked.”
He is proud of all of Colonia’s teams and its two recent successor head coaches, Tom Roati in football and Dan Grasso in wrestling, who have continued to develop students.
And that is one of the most important things.
“You can’t replace relationships,” he said. “It’s great to see guys you played wrestling with or football with or softball with come back and coach or be good parents or good people in the community. It means you’ve made a positive impact on someone.”
He recalled being driven around one day when a PSE&G worker’s head popped out of a manhole.
“A kid who was wrestling for me came out of a manhole in the middle of a match and hugged me in the middle of the road, and that was amazing,” LaSala said. “I think that’s the proudest thing. I’m not going to lie. My son becoming a coach was a big thing for me. My youngest daughter is a teacher, following in my footsteps. Being able to give back like that and being a high school coach means you don’t make a ton of money, you don’t make a ton of money.”
LaSala doesn’t golf or fish — his current hobby is watching MLB games on TV — but he plans to spend time with his family, including his grandfather, wife Sue, daughters Lexi and Marissa and son Joe, who recently became the wide receivers coach at Farleigh Dickinson.
Of course, he has more memories than he can fit in a box, and plenty of time to make more.
“I didn’t want to do a farewell tour,” LaSala says. “I don’t like that sort of thing. I don’t like saying goodbye. I always just say it’s a new beginning.”
