This year the girls finished 15-2 in the regular season. Ranking top 5 in the WPIAL for the regular season. The girls didn’t start the season too hot, in their first match against Butler it would end in a loss. But early on this team was without 3 starters in the match. Even with all of those injuries the girls still prevailed beating a top 3 team in the WPIAL shortly after that.
“The biggest thing, it’s injuries. Throughout the year but, that’s just part of the game. So the girls prevailed,” coach Drew D’agastino said.
From there they girls only continued to pile on the the wins. Beating Pine Richland 39-36 in a big match in the section which was their biggest match of the whole year. With this team being so young and winning how they did there are many bright stars on this team.
Freshman standout Gianna Alcadae had a amazing winning 30 matches. As well as qualifying for states as a freshman which is almost unheard of for a freshman to do. She also ended up take 5th at Whitfields and 4th in the regional tournament. Charlotte Paladin ended up only missing states by one match but still had a amazing season. But by far the person who really led this team was Blythe Letters who became the first person in Shaler to receive a bronze medal and she did it as a sophomore.
“Blythe wrestled awesome. You know, her last couple of weeks, she took 2nd in Whitfield’s and followed that up by pinning the girl that beat her. She had a great run,” said D’agastino.
She ended up beating the second, fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth placed in the states in the last couple of weeks of the competition.
“We really talked about it all year, peaking at the right time, which would be in late February into March,” said D’agastino.
With all their young individual success this team is one of the youngest teams in the WPIAL with 10 sophomore and freshman starting for the team. With an actual playoffs coming into girls wrestling next year and this team being so young they could really make some noise. There’s very high hopes for these groups of girls of adding more than two girls to the states from this team.
“We’re capable of taking five more girls to states so if we want to make the competition a lot more difficult in terms of America and some of the competition,” said D’agastino.
