The high school wrestling season comes to a close this weekend in Hershey with the PIAA Individual Wrestling Championships. For the 71st consecutive year, WJPA will bring you start-to-finish coverage. Action at the Giant Center begins with the Thursday morning AA Preliminaries and continues through Saturday night’s AAA Finals. You can follow all the action on WJPA-AM (1450) or online through our High School Wrestling hub Click Here.
As is nearly always the case, Washington & Greene Counties are well represented at the tournament. There are eight AA wrestlers from the two-county area: Burgettstown and McGuffey with three each. Fort Cherry and Jefferson-Morgan have one qualifier. On the AAA side, Waynesburg has five, Canon-McMillan three and Peters Township one. In addition, 16 wrestlers from the South Hills and Mon Valley are in Hershey for the weekend.
In AA Thursday action, only Riley Kemper (Burgettstown) advanced to Friday’s quarterfinals. Joey Sentipal (Burgettstown) and Jonathan Wolfe (Jeff-Morgan) lost twice on Thursday and have been eliminated. Three McGuffey teammates are still alive in the consolation brackets: Nate Yagle, Garrett Boone and Ethan Barr. Burgettstown’s Shane Kemper and Robbie West of Fort Cherry are also still alive in the consolation brackets. Altogether, the WPIAL has 11 AA quarterfinalists, three of them from team champion Burrell. Eight other schools have one each. The League also has 10 wrestlers still active in the consolations, giving the local district 21 of its original 28 AA wrestlers still in contention for medals. AA Quarterfinals and 2nd Round Consolations are set for Friday, 9 am.
Waynesburg advanced all five of its wrestlers to Friday’s quarterfinals., including Cole Homet who had to win a preliminary bout, then rallied off his back to top the Northwest Region champion in the first round. Gerrit Nijenhuis (Canon-McMillan) and Donovan McMillon (Peters Township) are also in the quarterfinals. WPIAL AAA wrestlers were 23-1 in the preliminary round, 34-21 in the first round and only one of the district’s 56 wrestlers were eliminated on Day One.