Apr. 3—Charlie Fick, who won more games than any coach in GAR football history, died Wednesday night.
Fick was the head coach at GAR from 1980-1997, finishing with a 120-80-2 record.
At a testimonial dinner in March 1998, Fick cited his reason for stepping down.
"You get to a point where you start wondering if the game has passed you by," Fick said. "I don't think it has, but maybe it's time to let somebody else do it."
Tony Khalife, who played on Fick's 1982 Eastern Conference championship team, was selected to replace Fick.
"I coached with him," Khalife said. "Charlie was a father figure to me. He really was a great mentor. A lot of the guys on that staff were mentors to me and Charlie was the biggest of them all. Not only for me personally, but for a lot of kids he really turned turned their lives around by the way he mentored them and coached them at GAR.
"Here was a football coach who was teaching advanced math. In a lot of cases, you don't see that."
Dino Galella spent 18 years as an assistant coach with Fick.
Fick was an all-scholastic football and baseball player at Meyers. He played in the 1964 UNICO Football Classic and coached the game several times.
Fick then went on to play both sports at Wilkes College, where he was all-MAC in football and played on the college's Lambert Cup championship teams.
Fick's first head coaching experience at GAR was with the baseball team. He coached the Grenadiers from 1973-1980, winning the Wyoming Valley Conference four times.
After eight years as an assistant, Fick replaced John Rowlands as GAR's football coach in 1980. He finished with a winning record in 11 of his 18 seasons. His best team was in 1982 when the Grenadiers won their first Eastern Conference championship, which was the pinnacle of regional football prior to the PIAA state playoffs.
