Feb 7, 2016 4 min read

At one time, the WPIAL Wrestling Team Tournament was a new and exciting event that drew overflowing crowds and made a lot of money for the organization. Now, it seems to have turned into a bloated event that includes too many teams, eats up too much time during the season but still makes money for the WPIAL.

This event was a great idea at the time because of the many strong teams in both classifications and no way to determine a true team champion in the sport.

The way a school won a team title back then was to acquire team points in the WPIAL’s individual championships. But that was not a good way of deciding the winner because a team with three or four finalists and not much else could win the team title.

The WPIAL changed the format in 1979 to a true team champion, replacing team points from the individual championships with head-to-head competition among the teams. The first champion was the Joe Ayersman-coached Waynesburg Raiders in Class AA and the Joe Shook-coached Trinity team in Class AAA.

No one was absolutely sure this new format would be a hit with wrestling fans, but they loved it. They clamored to the gymnasiums for the weeklong event that pitted the best teams in the WPIAL against one another. Many of the finals were held at Chartiers Valley High School and there are photos that show both sides of the huge gym filled with spectators.

The WPIAL Team Tournament became so successful the PIAA took notice and established its own version for all the state teams. It began in 1999 with Bald Eagle Area winning the first Class AAA title and Brookville emerging as the Class AA winner.

While there was some interest in the state event when it started, schools soon discovered the trip to Hershey, site of the state team tournament, was expensive. A three-day stay could cost a team about $7,000 for food, lodging and incidentals. One team, Burrell, which has won 10 consecutive WPIAL Class AA titles, scrambled to find funds for one of the early trips to Hershey because it was not budgeted.

The WPIAL changed its team format for the 2008-09 season, dividing each section into two subsections and forcing another week of qualifying events for wrestlers. Those changes, while advantageous in some ways, would be more welcomed if they didn’t take such a chunk out of the regular-season calendar.

Wrestling is the only WPIAL sport that has nearly as many regular-season days of possible competition (47) as postseason days of possible competition (45). Class AAA wrestlers whose teams fail to make the team tournament are off from Jan. 20 to Feb. 27, the start of the section tournaments.

Fans are showing less interest in the team events and who can blame them? Early round dual meets in the WPIAL Team Tournament are not competitive. The first round matches in Class AAA were decided by an average of 28 points and in Class AA, the average was 45 points.

In the Class AAA finals Saturday, four teams with strong programs – Belle Vernon, Canon-McMillan, Kiski and North Allegheny – could not attract enough fans to fill Penn Hills High School’s gymnasium. Crowds at other recent finals have been decent but not near the numbers in the 1980s and ’90s.

Even the WPIAL seems to have lost interest. The brackets for Class AAA and Class AA have not been updated on its website since the pairings were released nearly 11 days ago. That helps to rouse fan interest, huh?

Many of these rounds have side-by-side wrestling, which is confusing enough to fans, but even more so when wrestlers are not announced to the crowd before they take to the mat. That happens often.

For some unknown reason, the sport still does not require numbers on singlets to identify wrestlers. That is not the fault of the WPIAL, but imagine how much easier it would be to see the No. 24 on the singlet, look on the program sheet and know which wrestler is competing on the mat. There have been times when fans cheered for a wrestler only to find it was someone else.

The WPIAL should shorten its team tournament, either with fewer qualifying teams or by compacting the schedule. More is not necessarily better and wrestling fans will come out when they expect to see a dual meet that offers a close and exciting match.

If that happens, maybe the WPIAL Team Tournament finds the magic it had when it started.

Assistant sports editor Joe Tuscano can be reached at jtuscano@observer-reporter.com.