A Busy Offseason

   The offseason in high school wrestling has been busy to say the least, with a number of headlines ranging from coaching moves to transfers and things in between.
  — Locally, among those changes will be seeing Kaden Cassidy back at Bedford. I wrote about this last month - Cassidy back in Bedford colors. A former PJW champion for the Bison program, Cassidy will be looking to get back to the PIAA podium after missing most of last season.
   Cassidy will be wrestling under a new head coach at Bedford in Joel Easter, who takes over after the long and successful run of Brian Creps. Easter has a wealth of experience in coaching at Bedford, and this should make it an easy transition as the Bisons continue to rebuild the program to what it once was.
   Also, Tussey Mountain has a new coach in Mason Replogle, the former Northern Bedford wrestler who was an assistant in the Titans' system a year ago.
   There have been some moves around District 6 as well. Bishop McCort will get a pretty good wrestler in Noah Roulo. He'll be a senior at McCort, and he brings three state medals with him from Virginia, including a title two years ago.
   St. Joseph's Academy is making news as well, as I'm hearing some of its better wrestlers won't be there. That said, the private school did gain one with the addition of junior Tyler Stoltzfus. Stoltzfus was a fifth-place PIAA medalist for Mifflinburg last season.
  — Plenty of news has come out of the wrestling-rich Lehigh Valley this summer. In my opinion, though biased here, the biggest of which was Bethlehem Catholic hiring Rick Thompson out of a short retirement to take over for Jeff Karam.
   Thompson is well-traveled in his coaching career, but was easily most successful in three stints at Phillipsburg High School in New Jersey. He won 268 dual meets and eight team state titles with the Stateliners, and was most recently at Bangor in District 11. After one year off, Thompson was hired by Becahi after being turned down for two other jobs.
   It's not always easy to replace a great coach with another one, but the Golden Hawks have done it. I could wax poetic about what Thompson means to me personally, but I'll leave it at this: He's one of a kind - a master motivator, supremely dedicated to coaching and teaching kids on and off the mat, and a coach who is worth the price of admission just to see him on the bench. It's tremendous to have him back in the sport.
   One of Bethlehem's other schools, Freedom, also made a coaching move in the offseason by hiring Dante Terenzio, who had been at Western Wayne in District 2. Terenzio takes over for former Tussey Mountain wrestler Brandon Hall, who had a nice run at Freedom, but the school decided to go in a different direction.
   Among those D11 kids that take the mat, the nation's top ranked freshman will be suiting up for Notre Dame-Green Pond this winter. Ryan Crookham came up through the Bethlehem Catholic program and was expected to attend Saucon Valley for his freshman season. Crookham won the prestigious Super 32 Tournament as an eighth-grader at 113 pounds last fall.
   While Saucon Valley missed out on keeping a future stud in house, Class AAA's Easton lost one of its as well, with the messy departure of Jonathan Miers to prep program Wyoming Seminary.
   Miers was unfortunately at the center of controversy at the state tournament in March, when he missed weight on the final day of the event. That led to Easton coach JaMarr Billman, a former state champion at the school, reportedly being verbally and physically attacked by family members of Miers.
   Following the season, Billman had been notified that the school district wouldn't be renewing his contract, but days later, he was reinstated after uproar within the community over the matter.
   Dashawn Farber, a former PJW medalist who moved to Georgia and became a two-time state champion down south, is returning to Pennsylvania and will be at Nazareth, another Lehigh Valley powerhouse.