Following Al Angelo
Tom Mullineaux took over Frankford High's football program in 1988, one year after Al Angelo's 12-0 championship season put an exclamation point on the most celebrated coaching career in Public League history. Anyone who has ever followed a legend knows the job: you can't be the guy before you. You have to be the guy after.
Mullineaux took nine seasons to win his first Public League championship. When it finally came in 1996, it came in a rainstorm, on a field at Northeast High that had been hammered into the kind of slop Al Angelo's Frankford Pioneers had played on when they finally broke through for their 1978 City Title. The parallel was not lost on Mullineaux. He had been thinking about it all morning.
I must admit — when I woke up this morning and saw all the rain, I was thinking about Al's team in '78, and how he got that monkey off his back. It was, 'Maybe this is my good-luck sign, too.'
The 1996 Title — Frankford 28, Dobbins 0
In the championship game itself, halfback Eddie Gaskins ran 17 times for 160 yards and two touchdowns. The Frankford defense held Murrell Dobbins Tech to four total yards and one first down. The final score was 28-0.
The postgame scene was the kind every Frankford alum has seen a dozen times at Oxford and Wakeling: players dousing Mullineaux with a bucket of water, Mullineaux scooping up mud and slinging it back, starters diving face-first into the mud after the final whistle, cheerleaders being playfully mud-balled, everyone marching straight into the Frankford locker room shower still in uniform. The mud came off. The win stayed.
