Whitehall football weight room dedicated in John Bendekovits' honor

Matt Millen said one of his biggest strengths in a football career that extended from Whitehall High School to Penn State to 12 NFL seasons that included four Super Bowl titles was, ironically enough, his strength.

For Millen it started at Whitehall with the weight training program started by then Zephyrs assistant coach John Bendekovits.

At first, the team worked out in a clubhouse at the Jefferson Street Playground and then the old high school on Lehigh Street at Hokendauqua before it found a home in a fieldhouse at the football stadium.

Bendekovits’ weight training program became the cornerstone of one of the most successful programs in Lehigh Valley football history, helping to produce championship teams and championship players. It became the foundation of Whitehall and extended past Bendekovits’ time as a coach to more recent NFL stars such as Dan Koppen and Saquon Barkley.

On Sunday, the now state-of-the-art weight room in the basement of the Zephyrs’ fieldhouse was named in Bendekovits’ honor. More than 100 former players, including Millen, showed up to honor the man who was one of the pioneers when it came to bringing weight training to high school football.

"John used to call us pissants, and that's what I was, but then I bought into this thing," Millen said. "Once we settled in here at the high school, I had a key made and I would get in here seven days a week. In the beginning, John was my goal. I said to myself I am going to be stronger than him. Then I flew by."

Millen said Bendekovits’ program was not just about making you physically stronger, but tougher mentally.

"What he instilled in everybody was a work ethic," Millen said. "I just came back from Las Vegas, where I addressed the Raiders, and we talked there about what was also being talked about here today and that's establishing a culture. How do you establish a culture and understand the work that needs to be done? We had a culture here. Guys like John, Stan Luckenbill, Randy Rice … they were here every day working at it and trying to get us stronger, trying to get us better. With me, what they instilled stuck all the way through."

Bendekovits spent 32 years in football, first as a player at Northampton High and Kutztown University and coach. After graduating from Kutztown in 1971, he began his coaching career at Whitehall under Andy Melosky and Joe Gerencser in the 1970s and was part of the Zephyrs staff that won eight league or District 11 championships from 1973-1986.

He became Whitehall's head coach in 1989 and led the Zephs to a 27-21 record that included a District 11 title and a runner-up finish. He then coached at Northampton and led the Konkrete Kids to a league and two Eastern Conference championships and finished his career with a record of 60-40-1.

When he got into coaching, he said no one really had a weight training, but he saw the advantages.

"I went through it and I wasn't muscle-bound and I thought it could help high school kids and we had a lot of success," Bendekovits said. "There were no steroids. There was always talk about that. But if I had ever known about a kid doing them they would have been gone."

The stories shared outside the locker room, inside the weight room and later during a celebration at the Hokendauqua Legion were all uplifting and positive.

"I can't believe this is happening," Bendekovits said, who enjoyed the moment with his wife, three children and seven grandchildren. "I am stunned and so happy to see all of these guys here."

Even coaches and players from opposing schools came to respect what Bendekovits did at Whitehall.

Millen said that when he got to Penn State, Joe Paterno wasn't the biggest fan of weight-training.

"Bruce Clark and me were so far ahead of everybody," Millen said. "In my sophomore year, I could bench 515 pounds and Bruce could do 525, and I don't think they’ve ever beaten that. At Penn State, our weight room in the locker room wasn't anything like this. It was horrendous. I used to go to Rec Hall to work out. When Joe would see me, he’d yell at me and say I was going to get muscle-bound and I was like ‘What are you talking about?’ He was so worried about us getting too stiff or whatever. That was the thinking back then."

Now, there's not a high school, college or pro team that doesn't have a weight training program.

Whitehall athletic director Bob Hartman said it was an honor to play for Bendekovits on a championship team in 1989.

"He was an unbelievable role model for me and mentored me in so many ways," Hartman said. "A lot of the things that I aspired to be in my career had so much to do with what I learned from Coach Rice and Coach B and I am so thankful to both of them."

Rice, who is now the principal at Allentown Central Catholic, was an assistant coach with Bendekovits and the two remain close friends.

"He and I would often talk about gaining an edge and what could we do to give our kids an edge and he saw the weight room and the weight program was a great place for us to gain that edge," Rice said. "It caught on so well that other coaches would ask to come down to Whitehall to see our weight room and see how we got our kids to dedicate themselves to weight training.

"John was the No. 1 reason for that, and a reason it worked was that he worked out with the kids and I worked out with the kids," Rice said. "We never asked the kids to do anything more than we did. The kids would look at us and say ‘if those old guys can do it, we should be able to do it, too.’ Many of them put something into it and got a lot of it."

Kevin and Terry Burns, players from the early ’80s, both said what they learned from Bendekovits in the weight room helped shape their lives.

"The things he taught us I remember to this day," Terry Burns said.

"He gave us structure, discipline and the importance of commitment," Kevin Burns said. "It wasn't just about physical strength. It was about inner strength. He deserves this honor."

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