Longtime area coach Fromhart dies at 68

Thursday, Sept. 2, 1999 | 10:29 a.m.

By the autumn of 1980, coach Larry Fromhart's high school football championship seasons at Western and Valley were well behind him.

Yet during one fateful season at Las Vegas High, Fromhart and his Wildcats, led by star quarterback Anthony "Koots" DiCesare, created a little magic and a whole lot of deception. For the crafty veteran Fromhart had reached deep into his bag of tricks and pulled out the old Utah spread offense that had not been used in decades.

DiCesare, who would graduate from Harvard and become a successful New York businessman, dissected befuddled defenses with his precise passing. Opponents were dumbfounded as he and the center stood alone in the middle of the field as the other nine Wildcat offensemen spread the width of the gridiron.

Although Fromhart did not return Las Vegas High to its glory years of the 1930s through '50s as many had hoped, his 1980 Cinderella team with the crazy offense compiled a 5-4 record and won the Sunrise Division title, reconfirming Fromhart's status as a local coaching legend.

Larry Clement Fromhart, who coached Western High to state titles in 1964, '65 and '66 and Valley High to a football championship in 1969, died Tuesday at his Las Vegas home from a heart attack. He was 68.

Services for the Las Vegas resident of 39 years will be 9 a.m. Saturday at St. Joseph Husband of Mary Catholic Church. A rosary will be said 5 p.m. Friday at Palm Mortuary-Jones, followed by visitation from 6 to 7.

"Larry Fromhart understood that prep football was a way of building character and by his leadership he inspired others to be leaders," said Clark County School Superintendent Brian Cram, a longtime friend and a Las Vegas High graduate.

"He knew that sports translated into lifetime skills and that helped his players become better students. He was an institution whose enthusiasm will be missed."

"Larry was tops as a coach," Del "Doc" Foster, the line coach at Western High during Fromhart's championship seasons, said. "He understood the kids real well and the kids respected him.

"He was a very good organizer who built that team from very little. We got just three quality players (from other schools) when Western opened in 1961. Yet by 1963 we were in the state championship game." Western lost that game to Reno.

Fromhart was at Las Vegas High from the early 1970s to the mid-'80s. There he also coached junior varsity baseball under varsity coach Lou Pisani.

"Larry taught great fundamentals," said Pisani, an assistant football coach under Fromhart who has since been a scout for the Kansas City Royals. "He was a tough but fair coach, who always got the most out of his players."

In the late 1970s during a Las Vegas High JV baseball practice, Fromhart collapsed on the field -- the victim of his first heart attack.

Born April 21, 1931, in Moundsville, W.Va., Fromhart was the eldest of three children of Vince Fromhart and the former Mildred Kenger. Fromhart went on to letter in football, baseball and basketball at Moundsville High. In 1956 Fromhart graduated from Indiana University, where he also played football, then went into the Army.

In 1960 Fromhart accepted a job teaching physical education at Rancho High in North Las Vegas, where he served as an assistant football coach under the late Chuck Razmic, whose Ram squad won the state title that year.

The next year Fromhart became the first head football coach at Western High. Since the Warriors' championship streak of the mid-1960s, no Southern Nevada AAA football team has won three consecutive state titles and only one Northern Nevada team, Wooster, duplicated that feat in 1985, '86 and '87.

Fromhart took the head coaching job at Valley in 1968 and a year later led the Vikings to his fourth state championship and the school's first football crown.

Fromhart, who over the years taught a wide range of subjects including history, government, auto shop and drivers education, spent his last four years of coaching at Clark High School. He retired from the Clark County School District in 1990.

Since then Fromhart has been a volunteer assistant football coach at Chaparral, Eldorado and for last year's state champs Cimarron-Memorial.

Fromhart was a past president of the Southern Nevada Coaches Association, which in 1996 inducted him into the Southern Nevada Football Coaches Hall of Fame. He later was inducted into the National Coaches Hall of Fame.

Fromhart is survived by his wife of 46 years, Ann Fromhart of Las Vegas; three sons, Timothy Fromhart, Daniel Fromhart and Samuel Fromhart, all of Las Vegas; four daughters, Katherine Fisher, Jill Fromhart and Janet DeFusco, all of Las Vegas, and Mary Lee Wyatt of Atlanta; two sisters, Catherine Gaudio of Follensbee, W.Va., and Karen Polinsky of Bluefield, W.Va.; 14 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.