A bench at the park for Coach Sonny

Under a tree at Alden Town Park, facing the fields where he spent most of his life, family, former players and neighbors gathered this month to unveil a bench in memory of Coach Frank “Sonny” Landahl.

The bench stayed under a black cloth until the end of the ceremony, with gold and blue balloons tied beside it. When the cloth came off, the slat read “In Loving Memory of Sonny Landahl.”

The bench was his daughter Lisa’s idea. Sonny died Nov. 5, 2020, in the middle of COVID, when restrictions kept the family from holding the kind of funeral a man who knew this many people would have filled.

“I just felt like we needed to do something,” she said. “This is where he spent most of his time. Even after he stopped coaching he was still always here supporting the league. So we thought this would be the perfect place to put something to remember him.”

Her brother Steve said the park was always the obvious spot. “Even before he started coaching football he was up here playing basketball and knew everybody in town,” he said. “It’s hard to think that this November he’s going to be gone six years. But it’s nice that people showed up, and it’s nice that we could do something like this to remember him by.”

Sonny gave more than 30 years to Alden Junior Football. He joined the staff in 1984 when Steve started playing, “simply wanting to help wherever he could,” in the words of the Town of Alden proclamation, and he became head coach of the Alden Invaders in 1986. Then he kept coaching long after his own kids had moved on, which is the part his former players keep coming back to.

Shawn Coppola was one of them. Sonny was his first coach, and he kept showing up to Coppola’s games through high school, college and semi-pro ball, sitting in the stands with Coppola’s parents.

“He was not just a coach, he was a mentor,” Coppola said. “He treated you like one of his children. He cared for you whether you continued to play or not. He always remembered your name.”

He paused on the thing that set Sonny apart. “A lot of coaches coach until their kids are done. He didn’t do that. That’s a rare thing.”

Coppola still plays and has coached, and he said the lessons reached well past the field. “Even as an adult I still use some of the lessons Sonny taught me about teamwork,” he said. “You can’t do this alone. That goes right through the workforce and family life.”

He doubts he is the only one. “Without him giving that chance, maybe I wouldn’t have. That’s probably the case for a lot of people in this community.”

Off the field, friends remember a happy-go-lucky man who loved the Bills, Elvis and pickup basketball, and who walked from Four Rod Road to the park and back for his exercise. David Lauck was still laughing about the fake Elvis license Sonny carried and once handed to a police officer during a traffic stop, before trading it for the real one. “That’s the way he was,” Lauck said. “He was funny. He was a good guy.”

Lisa put it more simply. “He was just probably the best man I’ve ever met. A good-hearted person, cared so much about everybody.”

Town Board members could not make it to read the proclamation, so Sonny’s granddaughter, Ellison, asked to read it herself. Lisa told the crowd the two had a very special relationship before he passed.

The proclamation calls the bench “a lasting place for family, friends, former players, grandchildren, and our community to pause, reflect, and remember a man who gave so much to others.”

That is why the bench belongs to more than one family or one team. Youth sports in a town this size keep going because of people like Sonny, who stay on after their own children have moved on, and the bench now sits where the next group of Invaders will practice and where the next volunteer may sit down between games.

The proclamation ends with that promise, that “the lessons he taught, the friendships he helped create, and the lives he touched will forever remain a part of the Alden community.”

Ellison finished reading and then added a few words of her own. “Love you, Papa,” she said. “Go Bulldogs. Go Bills.”