Of coaches, team tournaments and the WPIAL Hall of Fame
In this corner of Pennsylvania, the football year can be divided into four seasons: the preseason, regular season, postseason and coaching change season. We are deep into the latter.
So far this month, we’ve had one local head football coach (Ed Dalton at McGuffey) resign and three others hired. The latest hiring was Tuesday night at South Fayette, where Marty Spieler was selected to replace highly successful Joe Rossi, who resigned at the end of last season. Spieler was an assistant on Rossi’s staff for one season.
Spieler doesn’t have any head coaching credits on his resume, but he has a wealth of coaching experience at the high school and collegiate levels. He began his career as a defensive quality control coach at Georgia Southern before returning to his alma mater, Allegheny College, as an assistant.
He went on to spend three years as a graduate assistant at the Division I level with Cincinnati. He was tight ends coach for one year with the Bearcats and was there for part of Travis Kelce’s career. Spieler also coached at Buffalo, Florida A&M and Missouri State. The Woodland Hills graduate returned to Western Pennsylvania and was an assistant at Mt. Lebanon when the Blue Devils won WPIAL and PIAA Class 6A championships in 2021.
Spieler will have a tough act to follow. Rossi coached South Fayette for 17 years. His teams won 10 conference championships and qualified for the WPIAL playoffs 13 times, winning four WPIAL championships and two state titles.
The other high school head coaches hired this month were Dan Lis at Chartiers-Houston and Robert Heller at Ringgold.
* The WPIAL Wrestling Team Tournament pairings were released Thursday and in Class 3A it seems as if something — actually two things — is missing. Absent from the brackets are the names Canon-McMillan and Waynesburg. The two teams that dominated the local wrestling scene for most of the past decade failed to make this year’s tournament.
The last time the WPIAL held a team tournament without Canon-McMillan or Waynesburg in the field was … never.
The last time Canon-McMillan missed the team tournament was in the COVID-19 year of 2021, when only seven teams were included in Class 3A. The last season when the Big Macs missed a full-field team tournament was in 1979.
Waynesburg, which has bounced between Class 3A and 2A during its history, last missed the team tournament in 2014.
Two Washington County schools received No. 1 seeds Thursday, defending champion Burgettstown in Class 2A and Trinity in Class 3A.
The tournaments begin Monday with preliminary round action. The first round and quarterfinals are set for Wednesday with Burgettstown and Trinity both hosting four-team pods.
The other local teams that qualified for the tournaments are Ringgold and Peters Township in Class 3A and McGuffey and Bentworth in Class 2A.
* The first WPIAL Hall of Fame Class was inducted in 2007. The 17th class – there was no inductions during 2021 because of COVID-19 – will join this year and includes two local residents – former Washington High School basketball coach Ron Faust and Charleroi athlete/coach/official Jim Chacko – along with the 1989 Peters Township boys soccer team and the 2011-12 Canon-McMillan wrestling team.
While Faust, Chacko and two teams are certainly deserving selections, there are many former athletes and teams, some from local schools, that for whatever reason are not in the WPIAL Hall of Fame. Some are glaring omissions. For example, Joe Montana and Bill George are not in the WPIAL Hall of Fame. They’re both in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And George was not just an outstanding football player. He won a state wrestling championship at Waynesburg.
Barry Alvarez is not in the WPIAL Hall of Fame. Neither are Ralph Cindrich, Marty Schottenehimer, Marvin Lewis, James Conklin and William “Doc” Harris. I could go on.
* It looks like the NCAA Division III football playoffs will be expanding from its current 32 teams to 40 teams. It could happen as soon as this season. That should be good news for Washington & Jefferson.
Sports editor Chris Dugan can be reached at dugan@observer-reporter.com