Daniel A. Piloseno, 1914 - 2003
Central Catholic coach lifted wrestling program
Daniel A. Piloseno, a former coach and teacher at Central Catholic High School who helped build the wrestling program there into a state contender, died Tuesday in University Community Hospital, Tampa. He was 88.
He died from complications of pneumonia, stroke, and diabetes, his son, Daniel, Jr., said. Formerly of Sylvania Township and Worthington, Ohio, Mr. Piloseno lived most recently in Tampa and suburban New York City.
He was an assistant football coach and government teacher at Central Catholic in the late 1950s when he was assigned as head coach of a moribund wrestling program.
"He was an amazing character," said Dick Torio, founder of Torio's Health Club, who has wrestled, coached, and officiated the sport. Mr. Torio helped Mr. Piloseno the first few weeks.
"He did a marvelous job. He built the team up so that when they wrestled Rogers and St. Francis and Whitmer [high schools], you couldn't get in," Mr. Torio said. "the competition was fierce."
Mr. Piloseno was inducted into several statewide athletic halls of fame, including the coaches and wrestling halls of fame and, in 1996, into the Central Catholic Hall of Fame.
"He wasn't only important to the program at Central Catholic, he was important to wrestling in the Toledo area," said Mitch Naufel, wrestling coach at the school the last 16 years. Central Catholic last month held its sixth annual Dan Piloseno Wrestling Invitational.
Mr. Piloseno was an all Atlantic Coast Conference offensive lineman at North Carolina State University and coached football at the high school and college level.
"It's ironic that [wrestling was] what they inducted him into the athletic hall of fame for, because football had been his life" until the Central Catholic wrestling program, said his son, an administrative law judge with the Social Security Administration.
Mr. Piloseno grew up in Bellaire, Ohio, and was an Army veteran of World War II serving stateside. He had nearly completed his doctorate in education at the University of Toledo in the mid-1960s when he became supervisor of public high schools in Franklin County. He retired in 1983.