Inside Athletics | 9/11/2026 10:31:00 AM
Hugh Conrad, Jr. has worked as an educator and professional writer from more than 50 years. He was also the head coach of Saint Francis football for two seasons (1984-85). Conrad took time to share his memory of a former player who tragically lost his life in the September 11th attacks.
I remember this particular recruiting talk very well. As a head football coach, I met with Larry Senko and his parents, Ed and Margaret, at St. Francis College in Loretto, Pa. on a cold winter morning in early 1985. Larry had been a very good lineman for Mon Valley Catholic High School in Western Pennsylvania, and he was visiting St. Francis to see if he would like to earn a degree from the Loretto, Pa. school while also playing football for the Red Flash.
We talked about many things, including the best-known athlete from his hometown, Stan Musial, the great St. Louis Cardinal baseball player who also grew up in Larry's hometown of Donora, Pa.
What impressed me was the closeness of the parents and their son, and how they had great dreams for their son's success. As a Division III coach, my focus was always on academics, and that is what I stressed with the parents. Larry had been very clear about what he wanted to major in at St. Francis: "Business Administration." And his parents whispered to me a little later when Larry went on a frigid tour of campus, "Larry has big dreams … and he is a hard worker. And he just loves football."
All of those were either true — or became true.
Larry's road to success
Larry enrolled at St. Francis that summer of 1985, and he embarked upon what would become a veritable Horatio Alger role in the business world. Upon graduation from St. Francis in 1989, he moved to the Philadelphia Main Line where he started his career in corporate recruiting.
In 1997, after working in the interview industry in the Philadelphia area for a number of years, he was hired as a Vice President for Alliance Consulting in New York City. He and his wife, Debbi, had built a home in the Philadelphia suburb of Yardley, where she was a teacher.
Larry commuted from Yardley to NYC every day, working long hours.
Alliance had its offices on the 102nd floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower.
That was where he was on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists flew a plane into the WTC and he was in a conference room there on the 102nd floor.
Remembering Larry at St. Francis
In the summer of '85, I was tutoring in the English Comp program at SFC, so I was able to develop a much better relationship with him at that time than I had previously.
One morning, one of the other freshman recruits had a conversation with me, one that I did not want to hear,
"Larry broke his foot," he said
Immediately, my heart dropped. Is he all right? Larry was one of our most promising recruits. "How did it happen?"
"He was just running down the hill and stepped into a hole."
Quotes are approximate after 40+ years, date was mid-July 1985
Fortunately, it was a stress-fracture, and he would be ready for the start of football, though it slowed him that year.
I knew Larry just one year since I left at the end of that season. Larry played one more year, but he was not happy with the direction of the program and decided to place his full focus on academics.
Larry also had "big plans" for his business career, which were more important than football.
Marriage and Tyler
Larry and Debbi were married in 1997 and had Tyler in 2000. He would now be 26 but was only a year and a half when Larry died. He never really knew his dad. What a sad life to realize that happened to your father.
Recollections from Donora
A lawyer who grew up in Donora and remembered Larry said this about the family,
"I can just visualize the Mon Valley Catholic yearbook and his picture as a football player," [Tom] Kostolansky said.
Kostolansky was the Senko family attorney and one his daughters attended Mon Valley Catholic with Larry. He too was a friend of the family.
The Senko family were members of St. Dominic Church in Donora, where young Larry was an altar server. "The entire family fit in so well with the parish," Kostolansky said.
"He was just a nice young man who became a nice man. You could see in Larry the reflection of his family."
Kostolansky said he spoke on many occasions with the Senko family over the years. Both of Larry's parents have since passed away.
"They just never seemed to recover from that," Kostolansky said.
Herald-Standard, Uniontown, Sept. 11, 2016
Conclusion
Larry was indeed from a wonderful family, and he had an older brother, Eddie. His parents have passed away, but they took his death very hard. They were so proud of what he had accomplished.
And his wife and son will live the rest of their lives recalling a man who was special in so many ways, though Tyler will only remember what his mother and others will have told him.
Those are the victims of 9/11 who are often forgotten, the children, the wives and husbands, the fathers and mothers, and the brothers and sisters of the victims.
They are the one we should remember on this day, the living victims of that tragedy.
