McGuffey takes care of business
CLAYSVILLE – Once a fixture in the WPIAL Team Wrestling tournament, McGuffey had fallen on hard times of late.
The Highlanders, who made four consecutive trips to the WPIAL Class AAA finals from 1996 through 1999, winning three titles, hadn’t qualified for the team tournament since 2007 and hadn’t won a postseason match since 2003.
They ended the first of those streaks last week by beating Jefferson-Morgan to win a section title and advance to the WPIAL Class AA Team tournament.
Wednesday night, they ended the second.
The third-seeded Highlanders took care of business in their own gym, downing South Side Beaver, 40-24, in their first-round match, then dispatching Kittaning, 42-30, in the quarterfinals to advance to Saturday’s WPIAL Class AA semifinals at Canon-McMillan High School.
McGuffey will face second-seeded South Fayette, which advanced with a 45-20 win over Southmoreland, at 1 p.m. Top-seeded Burrell will face Jefferson-Morgan in the other semifinal at 1 p.m., with the winners wrestling for the WPIAL championship at 3:30 p.m.
Despite the victories, McGuffey head coach Mark Caffrey, in his second stint with the Highlanders, knows his team will need a better performance Saturday.
Caffrey should know. While his team didn’t have any postseason experience to rely on, Caffrey has plenty, having coached the Highlanders to those three championships in the ’90s.
“Both teams threw some scares into us tonight,” Caffrey said. “We got pinned, and in these big matches, you can’t get pinned. It’s very costly. We kept our composure and came back in both matches, which we’ve done all year. But you’d like to be winning.”
A drop to Class AA this season helped. But so, too, has a lineup that is strong on both ends, as the Highlanders proved Wednesday night.
While both matches began in the middle weights, allowing both South Side Beaver and Kittaning to take small leads, the Highlanders took care of business at the upper weights and dominated the lower weight classes.
Kittaning, which only had 12 wrestlers, jumped ahead 18-9 in its match with McGuffey, which began at 160 pounds, as Nick Vukovich and Marco Duncan and Jacob Robb all came away with pins at 160, 170 and 220 pounds, respectively.
Only a forfeit and a big 2-0 win by James Duchi at 195 pounds kept the Highlanders from falling too far behind.
But heavyweight Ryan Stienstraw stuck Kittaning’s Joel Tack for a pin early in the second period to pull the Highlanders within striking distance at 18-15, and 106-pounder Lane Kline gave McGuffey a lead it would not relenquish with a dominating performance against Darian Crouch.
Kline pinned Crouch with seven seconds remaining in the second period to put the Highlanders ahead 21-18.
“I just try to get the team as many points as possible,” said Kline, who also earned a major decision against South Side Beaver. “Once I got him on his back, I was thinking six.”
Caffrey has seen improvement from Kline, who is a rarity as a senior 106-pounder.
“He really came to wrestle,” Caffrey said. “He had two great matches tonight. All the lightweights wrestled well. Hopefully, we can get our middleweights going, and we’ll be alright.”
The duo of brothers Gage and Teague Nicolella followed with pins at 113 and 120, respectively, while Aaron Harris essentially put the match away with a hard-fought, 3-2, decision over Brady Trumbull at 126, giving McGuffey a 36-18 lead.
With four bouts remaining and Kittaning forced to forfeit one of those, the Highlanders needed only to stay off their backs to get the victory.
“When you have two holes in your lineup that you have to give up, that’s 12 points. That kind of stinks,” said Kittaning head coach Brandon Newill, whose team advanced with a 58-9 win over Chartiers-Houston. “We’ve done this all year, dealing with those two holes. It is what it is. We don’t worry about those and just wrestle every match. However it plays out, it plays out
“McGuffey’s good. We knew going in we were going to have a tough match, but the guys wrestled hard.”
And now, the Highlanders will attempt to do something a McGuffey wrestling team hasn’t done in 15 years – win a WPIAL championship.
“I expected to get this far. We have a talented team,” said Caffrey. “It’s just getting them all to wrestle well on the same night. Last week, we did. Tonight, we could have done better, but we won.”