Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League

School: Hempfield Area | Sport: Softball

Kalp coached softball on a field now named in his honor, a fitting tribute to a championship-winning career that lasted five decades. He was head coach of Hempfield’s softball team for 25 seasons and retired in 2021 with a career record of 431-111-1. Among those wins, 11 were bigger than most. The Spartans won four state championships, including three consecutive in 2016-18, and seven WPIAL titles, with five in a row from 2015-19. The Spartans went 114-15 combined in those five championship seasons. No other WPIAL softball team has won three consecutive state titles. They celebrated a perfect season when Kalp led them to a 27-0 record in 2017, and FloSoftball named him National Coach of the Year in 2018. He also led the softball team to its first WPIAL title in 1998 and the first state title in 1999. The Spartans also won the WPIAL in 2009. His teams won 16 section titles and 20 or more games eight times. The Spartans reached the playoffs every year but once under Kalp. His affiliation with the program started in 1991 when he joined as an assistant coach. He took over as head coach in 1997. However, his Hempfield coaching career had started three decades earlier. In 1967, the Mt. Pleasant graduate accepted a job as an assistant coach for the Hempfield boys’ junior varsity basketball team. He’d previously played basketball at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. However, his coaching career was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army and worked as a forensic chemist at a crime lab in Fort Gordon, Ga. After his two-year commitment ended, he returned to Greensburg and became a chemistry teacher at Hempfield in 1970, a job he held until retirement in 2004. Once back at Hempfield, he returned to basketball and coached the sport for 37 years. At one point, his basketball and softball coaching jobs overlapped for more than a decade.