Education
A native of Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, Hess attended Belle Vernon High School.
basketball coach gridiron football player
A native of Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, Hess attended Belle Vernon High School.
He served as the head coach at Loyola Marymount University from 1923 to 1927. Hess went on to college at Pennsylvania State University, where he played on the football team in 1916 and from 1919 to 1920. He played as a fullback and was considered a "star punter" by The Pittsburgh Press.
In 1919, during preparation for the rivalry game against Pittsburgh, team captain Bob Higgins had noticed that the Panthers tended to rush ten players when the opposing team elected to punt.
He devised a trick play using Hess, the team"s punter. Early in the game, Penn State lined up to punt, and when Pittsburgh rushed ten men, Hess lobbed a 25-yard pass to Higgins, who was running free, and he took the ball 92 yards for a touchdown.
Foreign his senior campaign during the 1920 season, Hess was moved from fullback to guard, and his teammates elected him as captain. In 1922, Hess served as the freshman team coach for Southern California, whose varsity faced Penn State in that year"s Rose Bowl.
In 1923, Hess was considered a candidate for the Long Beach State head coaching position.
That year, he took over as head coach at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, California. There, he introduced the system used at Penn State. In January 1928, he resigned from Loyola, where he compiled a 23–12–4 record.
At Penn State, Hess was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity and studied agriculture.