Apr 8, 2022 3 min read

If this were baseball, then the WPIAL and PIAA would be hitting .800 when it comes to advancing the sport of wrestling recently.

Earlier this year, the WPIAL switched gears on the team tournament and team eligibility when it offered schools a chance to compete in its tournament but not take on a WPIAL schedule.

That move allowed teams struggling with roster numbers to remain a part of the WPIAL without holding dual meets filled with forfeits.

But that move was just the start of things. On Thursday, the PIAA got into the act by changing the way it determined qualifiers from the regional tournaments into the PIAA Championships.

No longer are the qualifiers based on simply the number of teams active in a region. Which, by the way, made no sense at all.

Now, every region gets a minimum number of qualifiers with a handful up for grabs depending on how many underclassmen medalists a region produces.

Imagine that. Rewarding teams that produce medalists in the state tournament. How surprising. Not to blow my own horn, but over the 40-some years I have covered this sport for the Observer-Reporter, I have published more than one column calling for a similar move.

Earn your extra qualifiers by producing on the mat, not by simply being part of a team in a populous area.

That’s how it was done before. If your region had, say, a certain percentage of teams competing in either Class 3A or Class 2A, that made you eligible for the extra qualifiers.

It was a mathematical equation at its worst.

Meanwhile, districts such as 7 (the WPIAL) in Class 3A, was about to lose a qualifier and go down to three simply because too many of its schools were dropping to Class 2A.

The man who deserves credit for this plan is Frank Vulcano, the athletic director at Canon-McMilllan High School and the head of the WPIAL Steering Committee.

I understand there are some Class 2A coaches in the WPIAL unhappy that a qualifier will be lost under this proposal. But hey, come on, five qualifiers from each weight class is more than enough to take to states.

Under the old rules, the district took six from each weight class, meaning 13 wrestlers lost three times in the regional tournament and still made it to states. As you might have guessed, their record in Hershey was not very good this year, 2-26.

The tournament doesn’t need fodder to make the weight class reach 20 and some Class 2A schools should be happy not to have to pay the nearly $1,000 per sixth-place wrestler to attend the state tournament.

Vulcano’s plan is a good one and deserves a thorough going over at next month’s PIAA Board of Control meeting, maybe five, six minutes, before giving it a thumbs-up vote.