Local wrestling squads qualify for WPIAL AAA Championship
BALDWIN — After Saturday’s WPIAL AAA Section 2 Wrestling Tournament at Baldwin High School, all four area schools that participated, Belle Vernon, Connellsville, Albert Gallatin, and Laurel Highlands, qualified wrestlers for the WPIAL AAA Championship this week.
One school has not been able to say that for the last four years, as Laurel Highlands’ program has been resurrected from hiatus this season by Head coach Mike Zavada.
“I came here about four years ago from Connellsville where I coached wrestling for 30 years. Laurel Highlands asked me if I would help them build a program, so I said it would be a challenge, but I’ll come up,” Zavada said. “The kids have responded very well. It was a change in the culture. I’m a hard-nosed type of a coach. The ones here know what’s expected of them.”
Zavada had to start from scratch in the juniors and grow the program.
“I started coaching in junior Olympics. Those kids followed me to junior high. We had a junior high program that was undefeated last year. Now, the kids are in senior high, so we have a varsity program,” Zavada said. “We started from the ground up. Here we are now with the kids we started with at junior Olympics.”
He credited his wrestlers for continuously improving each year and being able to compete against stronger schools.
“These kids I have now, I watched them grow up. They’re still young and they’re still learning, but they’re starting to be able to beat kids they were never able to beat before,” Zavada said. “We’re wrestling head-to-head with the Canon Mac’s, the Connellsville’s, the Latrobes, and Hempfields.”
Even though the program grew from scratch, it is still not where it needs to be numbers-wise.
“We now have about 30 kids in the junior Olympics and about 15 in the junior high program, so we went from nothing to what we have now,” Zavada said. “I just don’t have enough. There are 14 weight classes in high school, and I have two empty spots right now. I’m hoping that soon I’ll have a full squad.”
His goal is to give the wrestlers an outlet to be able to earn consideration from college programs in the future.
“Our goal right now is to get them to win enough that colleges will look at them,” Zavada said. “I think the sky is the limit for our kids.”
Sophomore James Pierce was the lone Mustang who qualified for this week’s championship tournament. He placed third by beating Peters Township’s Mike McAleave 3-2 at Saturday’s section tournament.
“We’re excited, we’re young, and we all work hard,” Pierce said. “We have a good group coming up and we should just keep getting better in the next few years.”
Albert Gallatin is another program that is young right now. Head coach Duane Dupont is sending three wrestlers to the championship tournament.
“We’re happy to get three [wrestlers] through to next week. We’re a young team so this is a valuable experience moving forward. I expect us to work hard and win some matches,” Dupont said. “[WPIAL AAA Championship] is one of the toughest tournaments in the state, if not in the country. We just want to keep working hard and do the best we can.”
Connellsville is sending six wrestlers to the championship tournament. Head coach Tom Dolde agreed with Dupont on how difficult it is to win.
“There’s a lot of records and rankings in those brackets next week,” Dolde said.
Belle Vernon led the area schools by qualifying ten wrestlers to the tournament. That probably helped in first year head coach Tyler Nauman being named Section Coach of the Year at Saturday’s tournament.
“We had a lot of youth early in the season but now I’m finally seeing that we believe in ourselves more, and it showed today,” Nauman said. “(Winning section coach of the year) was a great honor, especially in my first year. We came into a good team and we were able to push them even more and we’ve been getting good results.”
The WPIAL AAA Championship starts Thursday at 5:00 p.m. at Canon McMillan High School. It continues Friday at 6:00 p.m. and concludes on Saturday with bouts starting at 10:30 a.m. and concluding Saturday evening with the championship rounds.