By Mike Finn, W.I.N. Editor

The first thing a visitor to Pennsylvania notes is the forested mountain ranges that fill this Eastern state, which the National Geodetic Survey ranks No. 2 among states east of the Mississippi River for its mean elevation of 1,100 feet.

“It rolls nonstop. I don’t think you can find a more beautiful state,” said Steve Powell, the wrestling coach of Easton Area High School, which sits an hour north of Philadelphia in the Lehigh Valley.

But there is something bigger than the height of this state: wrestling.

And no one knows it more than Powell, a native of West Chester, Pa., which sits 35 miles west of Pennsylvania. Powell has been coaching the Bulldogs for 23 years for nearly a quarter of a century. Overall, Powell has worked with wrestlers for over 30 years.

“I don’t know if it has become more or less competitive,” said Powell, who has coached 15 Pennsylvania state champions, 62 place-winners and led his team to the top spot four times in the individual tournament and four more times in the dual championships. “It’s been at a high level for a long time.”

And that spans nearly every level of wrestling in the state, which continually produces the most combined All-Americans — see chart on page 57 — at both the high school and college level where the number of native sons to Pennsylvania (57) who qualified for the NCAA tournament nearly doubled Ohio’s (30) Div. I entries.

And Powell has at least four words to explain the success of Pennsylvania wrestlers on the national level: family, tradition, competition, depth.

“It could be the working class, blue-collar families that put a lot into following high school sports and wrestling is conducive to their lives,” Powell said. “It could be the fact that we have so many Div. I college programs that the kids have a place to go. Because there are so many quality college programs, we have so many quality coaches. A lot of our school districts have full-time teachers that are your head coaches.

“There is so much that goes into PA wrestling.”

Pennsylvania, which is the sixth largest state in the nation with a population of nearly 12.5 million, is nearly a nation of its own when it comes to wrestling and has produced some of the biggest decision makers of the sport, including Bob Ferraro, founder of the National High School Coaches Association, and Mike Moyer, the executive director of the National Wrestling Coaches Association.

“It’s so imbedded in the culture. There is such a great tradition all the way from the youth club level through junior high, high school and college,” said Moyer, also a native of West Chester, who was introduced to the sport by his father, William, who was a long-time teacher and coach on the high school level.

“It seems like the average tenure of a wrestling coach is much longer,” Moyer said. “We don’t have quite the turnover of coaches that we see in a lot of states. It’s almost like a way of life in Pennsylvania.”

And it’s also the place to be for those seeking a consensus of the people of this state.

“We have the Easton Duals where a whole bunch of teams come to Lafayette College, which holds 3,500 people,” Powell said. “We can get that many to sit in a gym all day watching a dual meet.

“Ed Rendall, our present governor of PA, the week before he announced that he was running for governor, came to those duals and hung around for two or three hours because of how big of an event it is in this area. It was a good place to shake hands and promote himself.”

One of Easton’s biggest rivals is from Nazareth, which is less than ten miles away. And while the majority of state championship teams have come from the Eastern side of the state, Powell pointed out that Clearfield — 125 miles east of Pittsburgh — was once the dominant high school program.

The talent level is also high in other parts of the state, which is broken into 12 different districts and two enrollment divisions (AAA and AA) on the high school level. That includes the central part of Pennsylvania, where Central Dauphin High School of Harrisburg won its first AAA Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) championship … and just the second team titlist from District III on either enrollment level — after failing to qualify for the state Duals tournament.

“Some people say a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while,” laughed Jeff Sweigard, who is in his 14th year as head coach at CD, where he graduated in 1977 and earned his school’s second all-state honor. “I don’t want to be that kind of program. We raised the bar and have to keep it there.”

The PIAA tournament is held annually at nearby Hershey, Pa., which Sweigard said is tough, especially since first-round match-ups are predetermined and there are no seedings.

“The Pennsylvania state wrestling meet is exciting from the first whistle, because we have unbelievable match-ups in the prelims and quarters,” Sweigard said. “I remember a two-time state champ who got beat by a No. 1 kid in his first match.”

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