Oct 23, 2025 4 min read

Being a member of the WPIAL’s football steering committee is a thankless job.

Has been for decades.

For those people on the committee, putting together the pairings for the playoffs is a no-win situation.

There is sure to be frustrated coaches, players and fans, no matter how you seed the playoff teams. There will be harsh words and claims that some teams and conferences receive favoritism and that others get no respect. There will be many suggestions of how the brackets could be better arranged.

And with everybody having access to social media, the steering committee’s decisions will be picked apart and criticized for all to see.

Even the coaches, who have spent the past 10 weeks being second-guessed by fans, parents of players and even school-board members, can, and will, do a little second-guessing too.

The results of this year’s exercise in bracket assembly will be revealed online Saturday afternoon and all the criticism will begin.

There will be some tough decisions to be made by the steering committee. Well, not in Class 6A, where only four teams qualify for the postseason and they can easily be seeded by order of finish in the Quad County Conference.

The fun begins, at least for local fans, in Class 4A. Trinity can wrap up an outright Big Six Conference title by winning at Belle Vernon tonight, and that would leave the Hillers with a 6-4 record. You can almost hear fans of Greater Allegheny and Parkway Conference runner-up teams yelling right now for their teams to be seeded higher than the Hillers, though Trinity played a brutal nonconference schedule.

The most interesting seeding could come in Class A, but only because of a potential unique situation. Fort Cherry is the undefeated Black Hills Conference champion and the two-time defending WPIAL champion. The Rangers defeated Clairton in thrilling fashion in last year’s WPIAL championship game. Clairton, meanwhile, has won the Eastern Conference this year. The Bears, if they shut out Brentwood tonight, will have won nine games in a row, all by shutout.

Fort Cherry is a logical No. 1 – the Rangers still have to beat Serra Catholic tonight – based on past performance, but has there ever been a team with nine consecutive shutouts that was not be seeded No. 1? Has there been a team with nine consecutive shutouts to end the regular season?

* The WPIAL’s track and field community suffered a huge loss this week with the passing of Howard “Butch” Brunell.

A longtime coach at Waynesburg, Brunell was a legend in the track and field community for his ability to teach a certain event. It’s not a stretch to say that Brunell was better at coaching one aspect of a sport than anybody else in the O-R’s coverage area is/was at teaching a facet of their sport.

Brunell was the guru of the pole vault.

Pole vaulting is a specialized sport. It’s not like a kid can grab a pole and go to his back yard and vault over the house for practice. It takes specialized coaching, training and development, and nobody provided those better than Brunell. When coaches in WPIAL had questions about the pole vault they went to Brunell for answers. And he was always happy to spread his knowledge to coaches and athletes, regardless of what school they were from.

Brunell’s coaching is one of the reasons that Waynesburg pole vaulters have won 17 WPIAL championships and numerous PIAA medals.

* GameZinger.com recently crunched the numbers from thousands of Tripadvisor reviews of every NHL arena to find out which venues rated best with fans.

Pittsburgh’s PPG Paints Arena was rated the second-best arena, behind only New York’s Madison Square Garden. T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas was rated No. 3.

The NHL arena that scored the worst? Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.

Sports editor Chris Dugan can be reached at dugan@observer-reporter.com