Regional wrestling tournament gets a new face | News, sports, jobs

By John Hartsock

The Altoona Area High School Fieldhouse has been the host site for the Northwest Class 3A Regional boys wrestling tournament for the past several decades.

Now that regional tournament is a thing of the past.

The PIAA Board of Control recently approved the wrestling steering committee’s proposal to make a change and eliminate the Northwest AAA Regional, moving wrestling schools from districts 6-8-9 and 10, which had long participated in the tournament participated, to an expanded West Regional Tournament with WPIAL. schools held at Canon-McMillan High School in Canonsburg the weekend of February 28 – March 1, 2025.

The move gives the PIAA four regional wrestling tournaments in both Class 3A and Class 2A. In Class 3A, the tournaments include the Northeast Regional, Southeast Regional, Southcentral Regional and West Regional. District 4 Class 3A wrestling schools, which had competed in the Northwest Regional in recent years, will now compete in the Northeast Class 3A Regional.

The Southwest Class 2A regional tournament returns to the AAHS Fieldhouse the weekend of February 28-March 1.

All four regional competitions at the Class 3A level will qualify the top five finishers in each weight class for the PIAA state boys wrestling tournament, which will be held in conjunction with the PIAA girls state tournament March 6-8 at Hershey’s Giant Center.

District 6 wrestling schools that had previously competed in the Northwest Class 3A Regional – Altoona, Hollidaysburg, State College, Bellefonte, Central Mountain and Mifflin County – will all be affected by the change.

Mifflin County wrestlers will be the hardest hit and will now have to travel more than three hours from their home in Lewistown to Canon-McMillan.

Altoona coach Joel Gilbert has mixed feelings about the change, but is trying to take a glass-half-full approach to it.

“It’s disappointing,” Gilbert said. “It was nice to have it in Altoona. We didn’t have to travel very far and it always gave our children the feeling of being at home on their home mat and knowing what to expect from the atmosphere.

“But the PIAA decided to go in a different direction, and sometimes change is inevitable and you just have to deal with it,” Gilbert added. “We’ll just have to work our way through that tournament.”

One bright spot, Gilbert said, will be that the West Regional will provide extremely tough competition, and wrestlers who finish in the top five in their weight class there will be better prepared for the state tournament. Previously, the top three finishers in each weight class in the Northwest Class 3A Regional Tournament had advanced to states.

“Obviously it’s going to be tougher, but we’re trying to prepare our team to prepare for that,” said Gilbert, whose Mountain Lions will again compete in both the high-profile King of the Mountain Tournament at Central Mountain and High School and the Powerade tournament at Canon-McMillan this season.

“It will be good for us,” Gilbert said of the regional tournament change. “We won’t have an easy route to the state tournament, but if you get through that (West Regional), you’ve got a pretty good chance of being seeded (into states) as well. I look forward to seeing how our kids do and how they respond.”

A numbers game took the change into account. There are 44 Class 3A wrestling schools in the WPIAL (District 7), and only seven wrestling schools in District 6, six wrestling schools in District 8, four in District 10, and three in District 9.

From a logistical perspective, it made sense to combine the schools into one regional tournament near Pittsburgh.

“With the decline of larger schools, it was time to make a change,” said Frank Vulcano Jr., Canon-McMillan Athletic director and WPIAL committee chairman, in a recent article published in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “I think it’s good. We tried to do the same in 2A, but this time it didn’t work.”