Two area football coaches - Bob Bydlon and Mike Falcone - were among five persons inducted into the 43rd Annual Hall of Fame class of the Lehigh Valley Chapter of the National Football Foundation during a banquet held last week at the Northampton Memorial Community Center.

Bob Bydlon, a Summit Hill native and graduate of Marian Catholic High School, and Mike Falcone, a former Bangor standout who coached at Pleasant Valley and Palmerton, were inducted along with Chris Gerhard, Mike Terwilliger and Phil Stambaugh.

Bydlon has been a coach for 44 years, including 25 years at Catasauqua as both a head coach and assistant. He also spent time as an assistant coach at Whitehall, Nazareth and Hamburg and coached at ESU in the spring of 1979.

At Marian, he was a three-sport athlete, competing in football, basketball and baseball. He earned all-league and all-county honors in football and baseball at Marian and was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Carbon County Hall of Fame in 2022.

At ESU, he started four seasons on the offensive line for Coach Denny Douds and earned all-PSAC honors. He was the head coach at Catty from 1990 -2000 and had an overall record of 59-25, leading the Rough Riders to three Colonial League and two Eastern Conference titles. He was both a Colonial League and Morning Call coach of the year. He remains involved as a part-time assistant on Tom Falzone’s staff at Nazareth.

Falcone has served as a high school football coach for the past 49 years at various schools throughout the Lehigh Valley, coaching the offensive and defensive lines as well as coordinating the strength programs at the schools he has served. His coaching career began in 1974 as an assistant at Pius X.

At Pleasant Valley, he was the head coach from 1982-84 and again from 2004-09 and one of his teams was a Mountain Valley Conference co-champ. As an assistant at Pleasant Valley, he coached Hall of Famer John Blick who went on to play at Penn State.

He was also an assistant coach at Allentown Central Catholic and coached in the All-American Bowl held in Allentown in 1994. The former Bangor standout also coached at Nazareth and currently is an assistant at Palmerton where his son Matthew was an NFF scholar-athlete winner in 2009.