The Varsity Wrestling Team has been training hard during the off-season and early part of the season in hopes to better their sub-par record from last year.
The Hawks look forward to a challenging schedule including four home matches, one of which will take place in front of the entire student body on January 9th at 1:30 PM in the main gym. The BP grapplers will also journey through Western Pennsylvania to attend five prestigious tournaments and four away matches that lead up to the ultimate goal of the WPIAL tournament. In previous years, the Hawks have had a lot of success in their upcoming Eastern Area Tournament that is taking place this Friday and Saturday at Gateway High School.
The Varsity line-up features nine returning starters from last year and seven seniors that plan to “blast double” their way through the competition and to the top of the podium. The Hawks will forfeit the weight class of 120 pounds unless I, Michael Vogel, drop to that weight. In the meantime, they look to earn bonus points from some of their standouts such as Dan Sullivan and Paul Dunn. These two outstanding wrestlers are both WPIAL qualifiers and Eastern Area runner-ups in previous years, but they look to better that this year.
The Hawks have a strong wrestling tradition. They won their Section in 2008 and 2009 and the WPIAL title in 2009. They have had several alumni wrestle at the collegiate level, including Marc Allemang (Class of 2001 and Hall of Fame Class of 2007) and three are currently wrestling in college including: Phil Kail (Class of 2011) who wrestles for John Carroll University, Nick Bonaccorsi (Class of 2011) who wrestles for University of Pittsburgh, and Brian Brust (Class of 2012) who wrestles for Washington and Jefferson College.
About this season, Captain Dan Sullivan stated, “After graduating quite a few seniors last year, we have managed to fill the line-up with some hopeful young new comers; overall, I think we will do better than expected as a team if everyone stays healthy due to the team’s mix of experienced wrestlers such as Paul Dunn and I and the new, raw talents coming in”.
Head Coach Bob Stewart has gotten the chance to watch the new squad practice for more than two weeks now and he said, “We’re very hopeful about this young group of guys that is anchored by a couple of veterans and we’re excited to see how the season pans out”.
One of the questions that I hear most often is, “How do you practice wrestling outside of school?”. When we’re not putting our heart and soul out on the mat, we take our hard work and dedication to the weight room where we get “chizzled” and pick up the ladies when we are finished. After a hard lift we hit the “tremils” if we need to cut weight in order to get down to the proper weight class so we can dominate the competition. And finally, when we get home we jump to our computers to check out the latest college wrestling matches and techniques shown by great wrestlers on the greatest website of all time, Flowrestling.org.
It would be in your best interest to come support the hardest working sports team in the whole school during our home matches. The coaches and team members would highly appreciate a large audience that could possibly change the outcome of the match in our favor as your Bethel Park Black Hawks “slide by” the opposition!
For more information on the Hawks Wrestling Team, visit bethelparkwrestling.org.
