PUP boys basketball Coach of the Year: South Allegheny’s Tony DiCenzo

As director of public works for West Mifflin Borough, Tony DiCenzo’s responsibilities include supervising garbage collectors and the folks who salt and plow the streets.

As basketball coach at South Allegheny, DiCenzo took over a program that, let’s just say was not very good, and this season helped them collect a first WPIAL title and plow all the way to the state championship game for the first time.

DiCenzo, who just completed his 13th season, has been at the forefront of what has been a remarkable turnaround at South Allegheny. A program that went winless the season prior to DiCenzo taking over in 2012 this season reached new heights.

For that, DiCenzo has been named Pittsburgh Union Progress boys basketball Coach of the Year. All WPIAL and City League coaches were considered for the award that was picked by the PUP sports staff.

There were other deserving candidates for this honor — Belle Vernon’s Joe Salvino, Chartiers Valley’s Corey Dotchin, Neighborhood Academy’s Jordan Marks and Upper St. Clair’s Danny Holzer among them — but the nod goes to DiCenzo, who has put South Allegheny on the basketball map, locally and at the state level, in recent seasons.

Prior to the 2019-20 season, the Gladiators had won only one section title and had never qualified for the PIAA playoffs. Since then, DiCenzo has guided the Gladiators to four section titles and five PIAA berths in six seasons, all while piling up a record of 125-35 (78%). The program had some championship-caliber teams in recent seasons, but it was the 2024-25 Gladiators who earned the school its first WPIAL championship courtesy of a 37-35 win against two-time defending champion Aliquippa in the Class 3A title game. The Gladiators came up a win short of claiming a first PIAA title, but their 27 wins were by far the most in program history.

“It’s been amazing,” DiCenzo said. “I’m glad we now have that piece of hardware to validate everything we did. We were the first team to experience it, but I thought any of the other teams could have achieved it. For two years we moved up to 4A. That was unfortunate for that group because we were able to compete there, but there were two or three teams that were head and shoulders above everyone else. The whole experience is really fulfilling. I think we won this year because of those losing experiences the last few years. I think that molded us and prepared us to be successful this year.”

Among the players powering South Allegheny’s surge was Cameron Epps, a senior guard who averaged 18 points per game while becoming the third Epps brother — Antonio and Bryce did it previously — to score 1,000 career points on DiCenzo-led teams. Epps and junior Drew Cook formed one of the WPIAL’s top backcourts.

“Our relationship has definitely grown over the last four years. It’s been tremendous,” Epps said of DiCenzo. “He reflects on what I see as a player and I reflect on what he sees as a coach. That dynamic there is one of the reasons we were so successful.”

DiCenzo, 40, is a 2003 West Mifflin High School graduate who was the sixth man on the Titans’ 2002 team that played for the PIAA Class 3A championship. DiCenzo then played at CCAC South for two seasons before finishing his course work at California (Pa.), where he did not play basketball. DiCenzo first cut his coaching teeth while he was in college. He was only 20 when he was hired as a volunteer assistant at West Mifflin by his former coach, Lance Maha.

“He loved the game. He understood the game. I could see when he played for me and when he was on my staff that he would be a very good head coach one day,” said Maha, now the athletic director at West Mifflin. “For him it was about getting experience.”

After graduating to a paid assistant role at West Mifflin, DiCenzo was the junior varsity coach at Elizabeth Forward for a season and an assistant at CCAC South for a season before landing the head coaching job at CCAC South. That role was short-lived, though, as the program was discontinued following DiCenzo’s first season.

DiCenzo was 26 when he took the head coaching position at South Allegheny in 2012. Some might have looked at DiCenzo like he had two heads considering he was taking over a program that had gone 0-21 a season earlier and had not reached the playoffs in nearly a decade. But as DiCenzo saw it, he was in no position to be picky.

“It wasn’t highly sought after, which probably benefited me,” he said. “At 26 with no head coaching experience in high school, not having to compete against too many people benefited me getting that job and that opportunity. You’re left with jobs like that, where the program is not in the greatest shape and you’re going to have to build it up. I was just eager to be a head coach.”

DiCenzo building South Allegheny into a consistent winner didn’t happen overnight. Far from it, actually. The Gladiators went 8-14 in his first season and made the playoffs in his second, but some lean years followed. They went 11-52 over a span of the next three seasons, going a combined 0-22 in section play in the final two.

“Having to go through that is really when I learned how to coach,” DiCenzo said. “When you have only one guy who’s a capable scorer and the other team knows it, you have to figure out creative ways to get scoring opportunities. I kind of learned to coach in those moments. Certainly, when I look back on it, I think of it as a positive. We were struggling. I always had opposing coaches tell me, ‘Your teams are competitive. You just don’t have the talent. Just stay the course and you’re going to be successful.’ It was reassuring.”

It has been the roaring ’20s for South Allegheny, which went 23-2, made its first-ever trip to the WPIAL semifinals and captured its first PIAA playoff win during the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season and has been building on that momentum ever since. The Gladiators reached their first WPIAL final in 2021 and the semifinals in 2022 — both seasons in Class 3A — before seeing their season end in the WPIAL Class 4A quarterfinals in 2023 and 2024.

After years of knocking on the championship door, South Allegheny knocked it down this season. The Gladiators (27-4) won the Section 3 title without dropping a game and earned impressive non-section wins against WPIAL Class 4A champion Belle Vernon, Class 4A power Avonworth, WPIAL Class 1A runner-up Serra Catholic and City League runner-up Obama Academy.

The biggest two wins of the season came against perennial heavyweight Aliquippa, one in the WPIAL championship (37-35) and the other in the PIAA semifinals (36-31). Both games were low scoring and played out in similar fashion, with Aliquippa leading for most of the game before the Gladiators rallied late for wins.

“He was one of the people I most wanted to get a championship for,” Epps said. “He’s been here for so long and has been close so many times. It was definitely on my mind to get him one. He definitely deserved it. It was great to see how happy he was.”

South Allegheny had four PIAA playoff wins all time coming into the season, a number the Gladiators doubled in the past month. The Gladiators nearly capped the season with a first PIAA title but saw a 14-point lead disappear in a 60-51 loss to Philadelphia Catholic League power West Catholic in the championship at Giant Center in Hershey.

“I think he’s done a really nice job,” Maha said. “He does some things similar to what we did when he coached and played for me. He prepares, and he competes, and he’s put himself in the conversation as being one of the best coaches in the area.”

One of DiCenzo’s assistants is Maha’s son, Cory Maha, who is only 23. That’s kind of neat when you consider that the elder Maha gave DiCenzo his coaching start as a 20-something two decades ago. Assistant Nolan Stephenson is another young guy and West Mifflin graduate on DiCenzo’s staff. Stephenson is just 21. Nate Wojciechowski and Bilal Cook are the other assistants. Wojciechowski was on DiCenzo’s first staff back in 2012.

After guiding South Allegheny to a first WPIAL title and a first PIAA finals berth, DiCenzo and his wife Mackenzie are looking forward to a birth in July when the couple is expecting their second child. Their daughter, Sophie, will turn 2 on April 13.

And while DiCenzo will long remember the many wins and even the few losses from this season, he said that one of the lasting imprints will be the support he and the team received from the South Allegheny community. The Gladiators generated quite the buzz, which drew some great turnouts at games, some of the biggest being for the WPIAL championship at Petersen Events Center and the PIAA semifinal at Canon-McMillan.

“That’s been one of the most rewarding things,” DiCenzo said. “The amount of support and love that we received over the past month, from winning the WPIAL and qualifying to go to Hershey, it’s been unreal. That game at Canon-McMillan, that’s what community support looks like.

“I think that area has been starving for a winner for a while. We had support when we were losing, those years that were bad, and we were really grateful. People are quick to move off of something when things aren’t going well. I’m grateful that they saw what I was doing and realized that all we were missing was a little bit of talent. They were patient with me and gave me an opportunity to be successful.”