The PIAA has approved the expansion in the Pennsylvania State Championship brackets. The expansion adds four more wrestlers to the state brackets in each individual weight class making it a total of twenty wrestlers per bracket.

Executive Director of the PIAA Robert Lombardi said the plan is to have this number of qualifiers in place for two seasons and then will be evaluated on how well the move worked out.

The WPIAL will receive an extra qualifier in both AAA and AA. So now AAA will take four grapplers from the WPIAL tournament to states and AA will take six qualifiers instead of five. This should make the WPIAL’s success at the state tournament vastly improved.

The reason for the expansion is that Pennsylvania is one of the, if not the, top wrestling states in the country and the PIAA felt that too many good wrestlers were forced to stay home instead of having a chance to compete in the state tournament.

In other wrestling news, PIAA AA Wrestling Team State Champions Bethlehem Catholic has made the move up to AAA. They have dominated the AA team and individual scene for a number of years now and have finally been granted the opportunity to make the move up to AAA. This could put them on a collision course with AAA Team Champion Franklin Regional next season but first we will see how they fare against other AAA foes.