MORGANTOWN — The back-and-forth was like a tennis match.
“Who’s that guy?” the student asked, knowing full well the answer.
“Who do you think it is?” came the return question from Dan Martinelli.
“Did you really wrestle?” the student volleyed, with a teasing tone.
“At 98 pounds, and it was all muscle. Not like you.”
The two were regarding a poster with a picture of Martinelli, during his days as a student at Morgantown High School.
Said photograph depicted a quite-young-looking kid in a wrestling uniform.
At MHS, Martinelli wrestled, played tennis and performed in the marching band drum line, among other pursuits.
He would go on to spend an additional 43 years at his alma mater as an English teacher and tennis coach.
Come fall, Martinelli will still be on the courts as a coach, but he will no longer be in the classrooms and hallways of the red-brick school on Wilson Avenue.
He announced his (modified) retirement earlier this year.
‘Retirement’ beckons
Martinelli’s career at Morgantown High was stacked higher than those signature sandwiches at Primanti Brothers, the restaurant that was the site of his “retirement” party Wednesday afternoon.
Those quotation marks are important, as we shall see.
When Martinelli wasn’t teaching and coaching, he was contributing to the fabric of Mohigan life in many other ways.
He worked Homecoming and commencement. He advised student groups and served on committees.
“We’ll miss seeing him in the hallway every day,” said Mackenzie Sorton, who will also be a senior in the fall. “He watched out for us.”
“He has such a sincere love for Morgantown High School,” said his teaching colleague Jenny Secreto, who planned the gathering. “We had to have a party. It’s Dan.”
No doubt, the other Dan at MHS said.
Dan Erenrich, Morgantown High’s now-retired athletic director who went to work at the school the same time Martinelli did, said that if his friend ever had a bad day, no one knew about it.
“He was funny, upbeat, positive … always there for our kids,” the A.D. said.
An A … for enthusiasm
Students, current and former, could recite the Martinelli catechism at Primanti Brothers on Wednesday afternoon:
If you have a paper due, turn it in on time. Don’t gloat if you win your match. Respect your opponent. Respect everybody. Be enthusiastic in all that you do.
Enthusiasm is a family trait, his big brother, Paul Martinelli, said with a grin and shake of his head.
The Martinelli boys, whose grandparents sailed here from Italy, grew up in Morgantown’s Greenmont neighborhood, where one brother was most certainly sports-obsessed.
“Danny was crazy about tennis,” Paul Martinelli said.
He was also a crazy-good coach of tennis. His players won state championships. His teams were always ranked.
Late, but loved
On Wednesday afternoon, he had crazy gratitude for the party’s planner and the people who turned out.
“That is your legacy as teacher when your former students show up,” he said.
This fall, Martinelli said, he’ll miss those aforementioned hallways of Morgantown High.
He’s happy to still be coaching, though, he said.
“I don’t think I’ll ever really ‘retire,’ ” he said, employing air-quotes with his fingers.
Monongalia County Commissioner Tom Bloom, a former University High counselor and Martinelli’s rival tennis coach, teasingly asked if Wednesday’s guest of honor was suddenly going to start being punctual in his (sort of) retirement.
Martinelli, he said, has a known penchant for being fashionably late.
“Look at this,” Bloom said.
“The guy was 20 minutes late for his retirement party. That is so ‘Dan Martinelli.’ ”
