How team unity helped Bald Eagle Area wrestling’s 1999 squad to become one of the bests in county history
The common thread that ran through the fabric of Bald Eagle Area’s 1999 wrestling team was still unfrayed when members of that team were honored before Thursday night’s dual meet with Philipsburg-Osceola.
To a man those who were interviewed cited team unity as the critical component on a team that set the bar so high at BEA that no team since has even approached it: No. 1 in the country, PIAA team and individual tournament champions, Beast of the East champion. No public school has won the Beast, regarded by some as the toughest tournament in the country. The trophy for winning the Beast is so big no trophy case at the school could hold it.
And those were the highlights.
The Eagles also won the District 6 and Northwest Regional titles, the Manheim Holiday title and the Centre County tournament. If they were in a tournament that season they won it.
It was a team that had plenty of star power. Current Bellefonte coach Mike Maney won the PIAA 125-pound title while teammates Corey Guenot and Justin Millard were runnersup and Jesse Reed placed fourth in the PIAA individual tournaments. The Eagles clinched the team crown after the semifinal round.
But it was a team in the purest sense of the word.
“We preached togetherness,” said Coach Dick Rhoades, who was named National Coach of the Year. “We were one big family. The wrestling family at Bald Eagle has been tremendous.”
There was a Marine Corps-aura around the team, a sense of exclusivity that only the strongest and toughest could be a part of it. They practiced hard and wrestled harder.
Jeremy Lucas, a notorious head-locker who graduated with 53 falls, talked about the team’s pre-match ritual.
“We would go down into the wrestling room, turn out all of the lights, crank the stereo up as loud as it would go and then run around the room in the dark to get ready for the match,” he recalled. “I can remember that whole season like it was yesterday. Almost all of us started wrestling together when we were three, four, five years old and we stayed together as a team.“
There is probably no better example of that unity than the inaugural PIAA team championship meet with Upper Perkiomen. BEA posted a shutout, 53-0 to secure the trophy. Rhoades and several other coaches had lobbied for a team dual meet tournament for years, but when it arrived it brought controversy.
While BEA was coming through the western half of the bracket, having to beat No. 1-ranked McGuffey to reach the finals, Northampton, considered the best team in the east, sent its reserves to wrestle Upper Perkiomen to avoid getting its starters injured for the PIAA individual tournament two weeks later.
“The timing wasn’t the best,’’ Rhoades said. “We had to come home from the team tournament and get ready for the Regionals. But to say we weren’t going to go (to the team finals) because of schedule problems, that wasn’t going to happen. We would have looked like hypocrites if we hadn’t gone. And what’s interesting is that Northampton finished third in the individual tournament.
“Against Upper Perk they had some really good kids but they went against our really good kids and ours were just a little bit better. And once that happened we really started rolling. That (shutout) will probably never happen again. We never thought we would shut them out.’’
To get to the finals at the team finals at Hershey, BEA had to get past Meadeville and McGuffey in the quarter- and semifinals in one night at Clarion.
As it turned out, the meet with McGuffey was a classic with the Eagles winning 28-22 thanks to a flip of the disc and a fall by an underweight Curt Thompson at heavyweight.
BEA won the flip of the disc and as out turned out, McGuffey had to put its wrestler on the mat first at 171 pounds. That turned out to be Nick Richmond, who was undefeated and ranked first. BEA’s normal 171-pounder was Millard but rather than use him against Richmond, Rhoades inserted Mike Brownson into the lineup. Even though he gave up a fall, it allowed Millard and Thomson to move up a weight and both win.
“We made the decision Sunday night that we were going to do that if we could,” Rhoades said after the meet that night.
But if it had not been for some heroics from 112-pounder Adam Fisher, it might not have mattered. Fisher had jumped out to an early lead but in the third period he was put on his back and had to fight off a fall for :50 to win 12-7.
“When I was on my back I looked over at Coach Rhoades and he was sitting on his chair, his hands behind his head, his legs crossed and he wasn’t saying a word,” Fisher recalled Thursday night. “There was no way I was coming off that mat a loser.
“But on that team we didn’t want to disappoint anyone. We all wanted what was best for the team. We were all one big family. We expected to win every time we went on the mat whether it was in a dual meet or a tournament. I don’t think there will ever be another team like that (at BEA). That was a once-in-a-lifetime team.”
Even now, Thompson can recall the setting as the meet headed into its final bouts.
“The McGuffey fans were chanting ‘It’s all over, it’s all over.’ That just helped get me ready,” he said. “They thought they had it won. They thought Millard had wrestled at 171. But I was thinking, ‘It’s not over yet. I’m not done wrestling.’
“The great thing about that team was we had a lot of unity. We wrestled as a team. Everyone was cheering for the next guy to win. We were cheering for whoever was on the mat.”
Guenot was one of the stars on the team, master of the barrel roll takedown. He still holds the BEA record for takedowns in a dual meet with 296.
“What I remember about that team was how close we were,’’ he said. “I remember all of the hard work we put in. The majority of us started wrestling when we were four- or five-years old. And it all built to what we achieved our senior year.’’
That senior year was the culmination of a long climb that saw the Eagles finish third in the individual tournament in 1997 and second in 1998. Disappointed with those finishes, Rhoades decided there was only one path to get where he wanted his team to go.
“We knew we had to toughen up our schedule,” he said. “And the kids really responded. That’s when we went to the Iron Man in Ohio (finished second), the Easton Duals and then the Beast of the East. We knew when we went to the Easton Duals we would run into teams like Easton and Blair Academy. But the thing is with kids, when you send them against tough competition they start to have confidence.”
But the idea of being voted No. 1 in the country wasn’t even a dream.
“After the season I was invited to speak at a coach’s clinic in California,’’ Rhoades added.. “The coach before me was from Broken Arrow (Oklahoma) and he was saying they had between 3,000 and 4,000 kids in their school. When I got up to speak someone asked me how many kids we had at Bald Eagle, and when I said about 1,100 in grades seven through 12, they couldn’t believe that a small school like that could do what we did.
“We never thought about being No. 1 in the country, we just wanted to be No. 1 in the state.’’
This story was originally published January 11, 2020 at 3:39 PM.