PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The University of Pennsylvania football team is a perennial contender in the Ivy League and Ray Priore has been a huge reason for that consistent success. He came on staff in 1987 as an assistant coach and since December of 2014, he has been the head coach of the Quakers.
Priore played his college football career at the University at Albany in New York. He talked about making the choice to get into coaching.
"You say to yourself, 'What do you want to do for the rest of your life?' Our head coach at the time, Bob Ford, who is legendary, started the program back in the early '70s," said Priore.
"He always said a line that really meant a lot to me. He said, 'If you ever get to work at something you love to do, you'll never work a day in your life.' That really, really struck a chord with me.'"
As the head coach of the Quakers, Priore has won a pair of Ivy League titles and 62% of his games overall. His first win as head coach came in September 2015, when Penn stunned a Villanova team that was ranked in the top five in the country in FCS. The game was at Villanova and it was actually moved to a Thursday night because that was the week the Pope was visiting Philadelphia.
"We get on the bus and the roads around Philly on that Thursday night were just jam-packed, you couldn't go anywhere," he recalled.
"So we went back through back streets, out Route 30 and past the seminary where the Pope was staying and, I kid you not, a splash of water hits the windshield of our bus. I said, 'Guys, the Pope just threw us a blessing.' The kids sort of chuckled. We get to the stadium, and obviously tremendous effort by everybody, players, coaches."
You can listen to the entire interview with Ray Priore by checking out the latest episode of the KYW Newsradio original podcast, "1-on-1 with Matt Leon." Subscribe on the RADIO.COM app or wherever you get your podcasts.