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By John Hartsock
jhartsock@altoonamirror.com
The Altoona Area High School Fieldhouse had been the host site for the Northwest Class 3A Regional boys wrestling tournament for the past several decades.
Now, that regional tournament has become 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 to an expanded West Regional Tournament with WPIAL schools that will be held at Canon-McMillan High School in Canonsburg on the weekend of Feb. 28-March 1, 2025.
The move leaves the PIAA with four regional wrestling tournaments in both Class 3A and Class 2A. In Class 3A, tournaments include the Northeast Regional, Southeast Regional, Southcentral Regional, and West Regional. District 4 Class 3A wrestling schools, which had participated in the Northwest Regional in recent years, will now participate in the Northeast Class 3A Regional.
The Southwest Class 2A Regional Tournament will again return to the AAHS Fieldhouse on the weekend of Feb. 28-March 1.
All four regionals at the Class 3A level will qualify the top five finishers at 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 participated 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 impacted the most severely, and will now be required to travel over three hours from their home in Lewistown to Canon-McMillan.
Altoona coach Joel Gilbert has mixed emotions about the change, but is attempting to adopt a glass half-full approach toward it.
"It's disappointing,'' Gilbert said. "It was nice having it in Altoona. We didn't have to travel real far, and it always gave our kids the feeling of being at home on their home mats 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're just going to have to work our way through that tournament out there.''
A silver lining, Gilbert said, will be that the West Regional will provide extremely keen competition, and that wrestlers who finish in the top five at their weight classes there will be better prepared for the state tournament. Previously, the top three finishers at each weight class in the Northwest Class 3A Regional Tournament had advanced to states.
"It's going to be tougher, of course, but we're trying to prep up our team to get ready for that,'' said Gilbert, whose Mountain Lions will again participate in both the high-profile King of the Mountain Tournament at Central Mountain 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 quite as easy a route to the state tournament, but if you get through that (West Regional), you have a pretty good shot at placing (at states), too. I'll be looking forward to seeing how our kids do, and how they respond.''
A numbers game factored in the change. 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.
It made sense on a logistical basis to consolidate the schools into one regional tournament near Pittsburgh.
"With the decline in larger schools, it was time to make a change,'' Canon-McMillan Athletic Director and WPIAL committee chairman Frank Vulcano Jr. said in a recent article that was published in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "I think that it's good. We tried to do the same thing in 2A, but it didn't pass this time."