Entering his 24th season, North Penn coach Dick Beck is still going strong: ‘I don’t know what else I’m going to do’

Dick Beck is 57 years old, has five grandchildren, and is entering his 24th season as the head football coach at North Penn High School, where his teams have won an astonishing 235 games. These statistics, he says, prompt people to ask him when he might retire.

He says he is a year-at-a-time guy. Besides, a legendary high school football coach — his high school football coach — told him not to make any decisions about his future until at least a month after the season, after the emotions have burned off from another ruthless autumn.

“I used to joke with people that I would retire when I got my 326th win, because he had 327,” Beck said with a smile this week as he sat at his desk after a practice. “I didn’t feel like I was worthy enough to have more wins than him.”

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Beck was referring to the late Mike Pettine Sr., the coach from 1967 to 1999 at Central Bucks West, a rival just 14 miles east of North Penn. Pettine’s teams compiled a 326-42-4 record and won four state championships. A statue of him stands next to the football field.

Another high school football season begins this weekend in Pennsylvania, with North Penn, 11-3 last year, visiting Downingtown East on Friday night. Beck has some depth and experience at the so-called skill positions, so he has good reason to be optimistic.

With bigger, quicker, and faster players running more intricate offenses and defenses, high school football has come a long way since Pettine fiercely sought perfection from his players – and usually got it. Fifteen of his teams did not lose a game. Fifteen.

“Unmatched intensity at all times,” Beck said of Pettine, who died in February 2017 at 76 years old. “Now, he had a soft heart, oh yeah. But he didn’t let his kids make excuses.”

Beck, a third-team all-state offensive lineman at CB West who later became the starting center and captain at Temple (after Pettine pitched then-coach Bruce Arians to recruit him), won’t pretend to be as gruff a taskmaster. But he keeps calling on Pettine’s standards.

Only a few deal with X’s and O’s. Beck wants to establish an inside running game first, then expand the attack outside, then blend in play-action passing. A Pettine-ism: An 8-yard play-action pass in the flat still is hard to defend, and it can result in a 70-yard touchdown.

Beck, like Pettine, wants his fastest players to play defense. He broke in as an assistant coach under Pettine in 1991, when the Bucks went 13-0 and won their first state championship with a ravenous defense that did not include a defensive tackle over 200 pounds.

What Beck really wants, though, are players who want to buy into the program. It still works. He said 104 players showed up for the first day of summer camp – the highest at the school in about 15 years. Furthermore, he says he works with a really nice group of kids.

“We don’t have cuts. So be part of the whole thing. The off-season program. Come to every practice. If you’re not starting, get on the scout team. Let’s all be together,” he said he might tell a potential player.

“Not everybody’s going to be starting; you can only put 11 on the field at a time, right? If you have 104 on the team, you got 90 guys that aren’t going to be happy. Or, should I say, 180 parents that aren’t,” Beck said, smiling. “But for the most part, we get seniors [in reserve] who do a fantastic job at practice. They prepare the starters.”

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North Penn is a colossus, with a 6,300-seat stadium and acres of manicured playing fields. Among schools in the PIAA, only Reading High School has more than the 1,700 or so male students in grades 10 through 12 at North Penn.

A year after taking over as head coach from Pettine’s son, Mike Jr., who become head coach of the Cleveland Browns and is now entering his fourth season as the assistant head coach of the Minnesota Vikings, Beck led North Penn to the 2003 Class 4A state championship. His early teams had many more major-college prospects.

That has changed dramatically. The Philadelphia Catholic League, unbound by residency restrictions, entered the PIAA in 2008, and mighty St. Joseph’s Prep has won nine state titles alone. That 2003 North Penn team remains the most recent public school team from the Philadelphia suburbs to win a state title in the PIAA’s largest enrollment classification.

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The competition has become so lopsided that coaches and fans have clamored for a state playoff system that separates public schools from private schools. Beck won’t disagree, but he also points out that North Penn offers something that the private schools can’t.

“My point is that we, our guys, this is all local,” Beck said. “They’re all classmates. Everybody grew up together.

“We used to say that this was a perfect melting pot of kids. On our team, we would have your blue-collar kids. We would have your kids who may struggle financially, but they are hard workers. You got your kids whose parents do well.

“But they all support everybody. It’s a great little mix of races and different economic groups, and these guys all come together – and this is what the world is. Our school is what the world is.”

Unless North Penn makes the state playoffs, the Knights won’t play an opponent outside the Philadelphia suburbs this year, but the competition in the Suburban One League is harrowing enough. Crawford Stadium often is packed for games under the Friday night lights, Beck points out, and what teenager, in any role, wouldn’t want to be part of a spectacle?

“That’s what we try to sell: You can come to North Penn and get a full scholarship because everybody goes here for free, right?” he said.

His wife, Lauren, mother of their seven children, enjoys going to North Penn games with a bunch of friends, old and new. Beck’s three sons played football for him. Also a security officer at the high school, he says his players’ enthusiasm motivates him.

“I like the competition,” he said. “And as I say to my wife, ‘I don’t know what else I’m going to do.’”

Pettine was 59 when he stepped aside after CB West won its third straight state title in 1999. But then he came back as an assistant, first under his son at North Penn, then at CB West after Mike Jr. resigned from North Penn and took a 50% pay cut by accepting a low-rung job analyzing video for the Baltimore Ravens.

“How’d that work out for him?” said Beck, still a friend.

So there was Beck, floppy hat atop gray hair, showing his backs and receivers a few new pass plays after practice by running the routes himself, making his players repeat them a few times, emphasizing crispness and precision in their positioning and footwork.

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The memory of his mentor, and later his golfing buddy, is never too far away. Beck flips through his cell phone for what he called a “screensaver”: a photo of Beck being congratulated after a big 2003 North Penn victory over CB West by ... Mike Pettine.

Beck did not lose to CB West as the head coach at North Penn until 2019, but the Bucks have beaten the Knights four times in a row. He sounds as if this will be addressed before Oct. 17, when the two schools bash into each other again.

“Football is an aggressive sport,” Beck said. “So we try to push the kids hard. We try not to lie to them. You know it’s hard to tell a kid that he’s a really good player when he’s not. So we try to teach them how to work and learn, and they get better. They’re becoming better people.”