Listen closely enough and the echo of Bill Morello Sr.’s voice can be heard within the walls of the Lockport wrestling room.
“If you’ve got no stance, you’ve got no chance!”
It was a phrase Morello repeated for nearly 45 years. His hair may have grayed and his tone may have softened, but his demands remained the same from beginning to end.
He wanted his wrestlers to give everything they had. Morello was toughness personified and he wanted it to spill into his charges. But for nearly two years, Morello secretly proved he was tougher than anyone knew.
Diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, Morello didn’t want his wrestlers at Lockport High School to know. But with a life expectancy of a year, the disease wrapped its tentacles around Morello tighter than any hold he knew.
Morello never gave up, never stopped coaching and escaped death a year longer than he was supposed to. He died Monday at 69 years old, but his voice and impact on Lockport wrestling will never go away.
“When you love something and you want to share it with other people, they know that you’re doing it for the right reasons,” said John, Morello’s oldest son. “One of the greatest things about my dad is he did the right things the right way for the right reasons. And he always tried to do that with wrestling and everything he did.”
Morello wrestled for Lockport in the 1970s and went on to work for Delphi Thermal Systems for 30 years before retiring as a mason, while establishing a construction business on the side. His three children were young when he came upon a newspaper ad.
Pat Seidel started Lockport Kids Wrestling Club in 1982 and Morello became one of the first coaches. He had two stints as a high school assistant coach and also helped with the modified program over four decades.
But it was with the kids club that Morello’s family was officially introduced to wrestling. John was 8 then, Diane was 6 and Bill Jr. was two years from being born. John was the 132-pound state champion in 1992, while Bill Jr. became a three-time state placewinner.
Coaching didn’t stop when Bill Jr. graduated in 2000. Morello kept coaching, kept pushing kids to get better.
“It’s about the kids,” Seidel said. “It’s watching them get better, making that connection with the kids. We have kids that wrestled for us 30 years ago that still keep in touch with us, invite us to weddings and graduation parties and things like that.”
Despite his passion and intensity, Morello never forced his kids into wrestling. When he wasn’t their coach, he might have some pointers or criticisms on the ride home, but he allowed their actual coach to do his job.
And the sport became a bond that tied the family together. Diane came along before the surge in girls wrestling, but she attended all of her brothers’ events and sat through endless wrestling conversations without complaint.
Diane nearly drove off the road when her son, Rian Czaja, said he wanted to try wrestling. John’s children, Jake and Jonah, also became wrestlers at Newfane. And the family has taken vacations to watch the NCAA and Big 10 tournaments over the years.
“We watched all these kids growing up together; they became brothers and sisters of our own,” Diane said. “We would go to their houses, parties, weddings, it was crazy. We still share the bond with those families to this day. It just transcended through each stage.”
It wasn’t until Bill Jr. became Lockport’s varsity coach in 2018 that his father was actually paid for his coaching services. Bill Jr. was the head coach, but he didn’t view it that way. He just saw themselves as wrestling coaches.
Around that time, Morello figured out how to adapt his coaching style and keep connecting as the school introduced girls wrestling. And the Lions had two placewinners at last year’s first sanctioned state tournament.
“My dad’s smile would just light up a room no matter where he went,” Bill Jr. said. “My dad always told me when we started coaching together that, ‘I’ll know when I’m done when I can’t relate to the kids anymore.’ and my dad was nowhere near that.”
Morello’s children knew that any attempts to stop him from coaching after his diagnosis would be pointless. John questioned whether it was smart for him to keep coaching and pouring concrete at times, but he wasn’t going to stop him.
And so Morello displayed a new level of toughness. Forced to go through an aggressive chemotherapy, Morello often did it on the go, including doing so at wrestling tournaments without the kids knowing. Laying in a hospital bed, he even told Bill Jr. to make sure he followed up on a construction job.
Coaching became an outlet for Morello, a way to keep his mind off the inevitable by doing something he loved. At the same time, Morello wasn’t about to let cancer take away what he loved. And he persisted, as he did after his wife, Susan, died in 2015.
“Italian to the core,” Diane said. “… Did I want him to slow down? Maybe for just an instant. I thought about it, but I knew that if he stopped doing that — not that he would have ever stopped fighting — but that’s what kept him going. … I knew he’d never give it up.”
Lockport’s offseason wrestling program began the day Morello died. Bill Jr., who also serves as the school’s girls lacrosse coach, admitted it was strange not having his father there for the first time.
The Morellos will continue wrestling, partly because their patriarch wouldn’t want them to give up because of him and mostly because he ingrained a deeply-rooted passion for the sport in them. It was enough for both of his sons to become coaches and for the sport to pass on to a third generation.
But wrestling will certainly be different. Morello taught his sons the sport, then his grandchildren. And passing on the knowledge he learned was one of the reasons Bill Jr. became a coach to begin with.
“Wrestling, through my family, has gotten me where I am today,” Bill Jr. said. “… I wanted to give back everything that wrestling has taught me in my life and I wanted to share that with others. And the same thing with my dad. My dad had such a huge heart for these kids and we just wanted to share everything that we’ve learned.”