The next Big 30 Football All-Star selection meeting is likely to be a bit quieter.
The All-Star Committee, tasked with watching games around the Times Herald’s coverage area each fall, lost one of its longest-serving members on Friday. Portville’s Lynford Swetland — known as Wimpy to all of us on the committee — died at age 88.
I’ll miss running into Wimpy at games next fall. He was always sure to compliment a story I had in the paper that week and tell me which local coaches he thought were doing a good job. In those closed-door selection meetings, the highest honor Wimpy would bestow upon a player boiled down to seven words: “he’s a tough son of a (expletive).”
“Just one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met,” Big 30 Athletic Corporation and football committee chairman Brian Green said. “Obviously, he loved Portville and all things Portville, everyone who ever came from there, high school athletics, just a big football guy.”
Fellow longtime committee member Jim Colestro of Bradford, Pa., said he’d often attend two or three games a week with Swetland.
“We started going to games many years ago, there were more Saturday afternoon games and there were Saturday night games for three or four high schools,” Colestro said. “We’d see at least two a week and most weeks it was three, so that’s six teams. He had an eye for linebacker play and he liked the physical player. He was fair. He was as fair as anybody that I know and he voted for the person he thought was the better player. I hope we all try to do that every time; sometimes it’s hard, but he did it on a consistent basis. You knew if he was pushing a player, he actually believed in that player.
“We had a lot of fun together.”
A TIRELESS supporter of Portville athletics, he was known for giving kids a ride to the weight room in the morning while his son Gary coached the Panthers. Wimpy would earnestly advocate for Portville nominees in the meeting, but when it came to difficult choices, he’d take an unbiased approach.
“When he first started, he was always pushing Portville, which was natural; his loyalty to Portville never wavered no matter who was in charge or what the situation, so I always thought that was pretty special. He didn’t go around criticizing everything,” Colestro said. “It was positive, his comments were positive. And he wasn’t afraid to vote against a Portville player if he thought another player from another school was better. He was very consistent in that. He made a point to vote for who he thought was the best player and I think that was his strong point.”
Former committee member Kelly Lounsberry concurred.
“He could be opinionated in his support for a player, if a kid should be in there,” Lounsberry said, “but I always respected him because we’d go through those kids a couple times and finally he’d say, ‘Nope, that Portville kid doesn’t deserve it compared to the kids that are still in there.’ Normally, he was pretty honest about that.”
LOUNSBERRY, of Bolivar, bonded over the history of Portville and Bolivar football, a rivalry that stretched back to Wimpy’s playing days. Wimpy would recount playing against Lounsberry’s father in the 1950s.
“Wimpy always told me that ‘Bolivar came to town and we were going to show them how good we were, I was out there at tackle and that Wayne Torrey came around there and lowered his shoulder and he ran through me and over me, up and down the field,’” Lounsberry said. “We just got to talking about Bolivar and Portville football all the time. He loved local football like that. He loved Portville football, which we know, and that whole Bolivar-Portville rivalry. He says, ‘Oh, Torrey and your father, we couldn’t touch either of them.’”
Lounsberry recalled regular phone calls with Wimpy to check in on certain players throughout the season, even after the Bolivar native left the committee.
“He put in all sorts of time into being on that committee,” Lounsberry said. “When he was in his prime and able to go, he probably saw as many games as anybody on the committee on each side of the border. He didn’t just watch the New York kids. He’d go over to Pennsylvania and I thought that was big of him because some guys would only stay on their respective side of the border. He knew what to look for. He could watch linemen and like he said to me, ‘You’re a Bob Dunsmore guy, you grew up and played for him,’ and we’d talk line play. That was kind of Wimpy’s interest at times was watching linemen.”
AT THE 2021 selection meeting, Green presented Swetland and Colestro with plaques for their 30-plus years of service to the committee. Last fall, amid some health issues, Wimpy was dedicated as ever to the committee and won the Joe DeCerbo Memorial Award, which honors an individual connected to high school football who displays perseverance through a personal obstacle.
Green said he would miss the weekly calls Swetland would make during football season.
“He would call me weekly during football season to talk about kids that he had gone and seen the previous week and compare them to other kids,” Green said. “He really loved the process of being on the football committee and took that role very seriously. I can tell you that one of the hardest things for him was when COVID hit and he wasn’t able to attend games in person. That just devastated him. He didn’t enjoy watching them online, even if he tried to. I’m going to miss him. He meant a lot to our committee.”
(Times Herald sports writer and Salamanca Press sports editor Sam Wilson may be contacted at swilson@oleantimesherald.com)
