Cosimo Figliomeni

1930 - 2014

(News article) A hockey player and coach who was first to lead the St. John's Jesuit High School team and helped launch the Northwest Hockey Conference, Cosimo Figliomeni died Tuesday in Sylvania Township. He was 84.

Mr. Figliomeni died unexpectedly of natural causes while volunteering at the Franciscan Care Center, where he regularly helped out with bingo, his sons said.

A mentor to many and a booster of the region's hockey scene, Mr. Figliomeni lived in Sylvania Township. He established roots and raised a family after coming to northwest Ohio from Canada, where hockey permeated small towns like Schreiber, Ont., on Lake Superior's northern coast.

He was one of local hockey's "founding fathers," said Jim Cooper, a retired, longtime Sylvania Northview High School hockey coach.

"He was certainly such an important figure in the high school hockey community, and it was because of the class with which he conducted himself," Mr. Cooper said.

Mr. Figliomeni was born Nov. 13, 1930, to Maria Rosa and Francesco Figliomeni in Siderno, Italy. The family followed his father to Canada in 1937, fleeing Italy in search of better opportunities before World War II broke out.

They settled in Schreiber, where he played high school hockey and on a junior-level Ontario team.

In the mid-1950s, Mr. Figliomeni came to Toledo to attend a meat-cutting trade school and met his wife, Mary Arite of Toledo. They married in 1956, lived briefly in Schreiber, where Michael, the oldest of their five sons, was born, before returning to Ohio in 1958.

He continued to play hockey in a Toledo-area men's league and coached youth hockey in the 1960s, said his son Frank Figliomeni.

When his two oldest sons were at St. John's, they asked their father to help turn the beginnings of a hockey club into a high school team.

In 1972, he founded the high school program and coached while raising his family and working as a meat cutter at Toledo-area Kroger stores.

All of his sons played hockey for St. John's on their father's team, though he played no favorites, his sons said.

"It was a good experience because he was a very knowledgeable hockey man, a great coach," his son Cosimo said. "He really cared about all the players; his players really appreciate him to this day."

During his career as coach, he had a 237-129-16 record, winning league and district championships and trips to the state tournament before retiring in 1989.

In 2008, he recounted the early days of high school hockey in a story in The Blade. Then, hockey "was kind of a foreign sport to most high schools," he said, but he saw the team as a way to make St. John's a magnet.

"We had a goal, really, that we were going to make hockey equal to or better than basketball or football," he said.

Mr. Figliomeni and his wife welcomed the team to their house before the start of each season, and a priest would join them to say Mass.

In 1977, he helped establish the Northwest Hockey Conference, made up of high school teams from around the region.

"The league was formed literally at his kitchen table," Mr. Cooper said.

He served as the league commissioner after he stopped coaching, and has remained involved with the organization in recent years. St. John's current coach, Mike Hayes, recalled seeing him at a league meeting a month ago.

"As far as I'm concerned, he's the father of St. John's hockey, and I told the team I'm just baby-sitting for him," Mr. Hayes said.

Son Cosimo Figliomeni described his father as an ever-smiling "eternal optimist," and his son, Frank Figliomeni, said he was always willing to help, no matter what.

Surviving are his wife, Mary; sons, Michael, Frank, Paul, Mark, and Cosimo Figliomeni; brother, Joe Figliomeni; sister, Sarah Macchi; 14 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

The family will receive guests from 3 to 9 p.m. Friday at Reeb Funeral Home in Sylvania. Visitation will be at 10 a.m. Saturday in Little Flower Catholic Parish in Toledo, followed by a funeral Mass at 11 a.m.

The family suggests tributes to the building fund for Little Flower Catholic Parish or Franciscan Care Center in Sylvania.