Geis

Throughout his long and illustrious 30-year coaching career in the National Football League and major college football, Altoona native Wayne “Buddy” Geis made a profoundly positive impact on just about everybody who crossed his path.

Geis, an Altoona native and 2010 inductee into the Blair County Sports Hall of Fame whose home was in Neptune Beach, Fla., passed away at the age of 79 on Wednesday morning after battling leukemia.

Before embarking on his fabulous coaching odyssey, Geis was a football and baseball standout at Altoona Area High School, graduating from there in 1965.

Bob Johnston and Vince Nedimyer, Sr. –two life-long friends of Geis who were his former football high school football teammates at Altoona, recalled his impressive athletic skills and his positive, up-beat personality that made interacting with him a pleasure.

“He was one of the best,” Johnston, who lives outside of Charlotte, N.C., said of Geis. “His laugh, his smile, and his enthusiasm for life were incredible. I wish I had that.

“And on the football field, Buddy could play wherever he was needed,” added Johnston, noting that Geis played wideout in the Mountain Lions’ Wing-T offensive format and was also an outstanding cornerback on defense. “He wasn’t real big, about 5-feet-9, 5-feet-10, but he could run people down as a defender.”

Johnston had graduated high school in 1964 and traveled to McKeesport that fall to watch Geis, then a senior, make a game-saving tackle on defense for the Mountain Lions and their legendary late head coach Earl Strohm.

“It was the last play of the game, and a guy on the McKeesport team who had been a 100-meter dash champion in the WPIAL caught a screen pass near midfield and there was nobody in front of him,” Johnston remembered. “But Buddy caught him down on the 10-yard line and prevented him from scoring the winning touchdown. That was Altoona’s heyday in football.”

Nedimyer, who is also a Blair County Sports Hall of Fame inductee and had an outstanding NCAA Division I collegiate football career as a lineman at Wake Forest, had similar sentiments about playing varsity football with Geis at Altoona.

“I was a sophomore when Buddy was a senior and I was fortunate enough to play varsity football with him,” Nedimyer said. “Buddy was an outstanding football player, and an outstanding all-around athlete. On the football field, Buddy was the go-to guy. He was the gamer. Any time that a play needed to be made on either side of the ball, Buddy Geis made that play.

“We were friends in high school, and we were later on the coaching staff together for a couple years at Altoona High School,” said Nedimyer, who was the Mountain Lions’ head coach from the 1982 through the 1985 seasons. “Buddy was just an outstanding guy with a wonderful personality. He was always a guy who you could laugh with and have a good time with.”

As fine a high school athlete and teammate as Geis was, however, he made his biggest mark by far in the college and professional football coaching world, and he made that mark all over the country.

“Buddy had a great career and a really colorful life,” said former Bishop Guilfoyle High School standout George Geishauser, who was recruited by Geis to play defensive back at Division I Tulane University after graduating from BG in 1977. “Buddy was a great guy and I owe a lot to him.”

Indeed, Geis — who was a wide receivers coach at Tulane in the late 1970s — was responsible for helping Geishauser, who will be inducted into the Blair County Sports Hall of Fame in 2026, land on his feet after an unfortunate set of circumstances concerning his initial recruitment by Brigham Young University.

“He actually saved me, to be honest,” Geishauser said of Geis. “I had initially signed a letter of intent with Brigham Young but something fell through at the end and everybody that had recruited me had already given all their scholarships away.

“It so happened that a friend of mine who was a priest here and who happened to know Buddy contacted him and told him what had happened to me, and Buddy came back here, watched me play in an all-star game, and he signed me for Tulane after that.”

Geis had excellent people skills that helped him immensely throughout his coaching career, where he worked with a long list of future NFL stars and Hall of Fame inductees that reads like a Who’s Who list of football greats.

“Buddy’s players loved him at Tulane,” said Geishauser, who played three NFL preseason games with the Los Angeles Raiders in the 1982 season. “He was a very energetic, old-school type of coach but he always made things fun in practice.”

After coaching stops at Tulane (1977-82) and the University of Kansas (1983), a stint with the old United State Football League’s Jacksonville Bulls (1984-85), and another college stop as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Memphis State in (1986-87), Geis embarked on his memorable NFL coaching journey.

He was the receivers coach for the Green Bay Packers from 1988-91 when the Packers were under the direction of then head coach Lindy Infante. At Green Bay, Geis helped develop the talents of All-Pro and future NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver Sterling Sharpe.

Sharpe, who served as the Blair County Sports Hall of Fame presenter for Geis in 2010, led the NFL with 90 receptions in just his second season in the league and, under the guidance of Geis, Sharpe totaled 281 receptions for 4,280 yards and 23 touchdowns in four seasons.

In 1996, Geis joined Infante again on the coaching staff of the Indianapolis Colts, serving as a quarterbacks coach and working with then Colts quarterback and future legendary college and NFL coach Jim Harbaugh. Geis helped Harbaugh to notch the second-best quarterback rating of his pro career in 1997.

After Indianapolis, Geis moved on to Dallas during the 1998 and 1999 seasons, where, as the Cowboys’ quarterbacks coach, Geis worked closely with two future NFL Hall of Famers, quarterback Troy Aikman and wideout Michael Irvin.

After leaving Dallas, Geis returned to the coaching ranks in 2000, serving as Georgia Tech University’s associate head football coach with Chan Gailey. Geis was also the Yellow Jackets’ wide receivers coach, staying at Georgia Tech for five seasons and coaching all-world wide receiver Calvin Johnson, who later went on to an NFL Hall of Fame career with the Detroit Lions.

Despite having a magnificent coaching career that took him to many points across the nation, Geis — who is survived by his wife Jere, their grown son and daughter, and several grandchildren — never forgot his Altoona roots.

“It’s so great to be a part of this city,” Geis said during his 2010 Blair Hall induction speech. “I never went anywhere that I didn’t think of this city. It’s so great to have been a part of Altoona.”