PIAA moves football championships from Hershey; rejects Penn State bid
For the first time in almost 25 years, the PIAA football championships will not be played in Hershey.
The PIAA awarded new four-year contracts to host sites for all of its fall sports championships during Wednesday’s board of directors meeting via Zoom, and the biggest surprise was the announcement that the PIAA football championships will be moved to Cumberland Valley High School beginning this fall. The state championships had been played at Hersheypark Stadium every year since 1998.
Along with football, the PIAA soccer, volleyball and field hockey championships also will be played at Cumberland Valley for the next four years.
“It was a very tough decision because of our loyalty to all of our sites,” said PIAA executive director Bob Lombardi. “When you have spent a long time at certain places, you develop relationships with people. But we’re very satisfied with what we had in our decision-making process.”
Lombardi revealed that the PIAA also received bids to host the state championships at Altoona’s Mansion Park Stadium and Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, which seats over 100,000 spectators — as well as to remain at Hersheypark Stadium. Ultimately, the board deemed Cumberland Valley’s overall package, which includes a new turf field being installed this year, to be the most appealing to the PIAA and its member schools.
“Especially with some of the changes they will be making — not only adding a new field and changing the press box — they also have an indoor surface that can be used, a training room, weight room, media center, two artificial surfaces that can be used for walkthroughs, as well as individual locker rooms that would serve each player on each team,” Lombardi said. “There were a host of things there that were very attractive, along with Cumberland Valley making a very nice financial package for us.”
One of the main concerns about Hersheypark Stadium’s facilities was the cramped and outdated locker rooms, which many teams felt were below the standards they’re accustomed to during the regular season. Lombardi acknowledged that it was becoming more and more difficult to defend the state of the locker rooms in comparison to other facilities across the state.
Although other states such as Ohio and Texas host state football championships at massive stadium venues, Lombardi said the board did not believe holding them at a high school venue would take away any of the luster attached to the event.
“We did look at (choosing Penn State), and we took it very seriously,” Lombardi said. “There are some real concerns there. Playing on grass for six games doesn’t fly really well. That’s a difficult thing. And with the number of people we’ve been drawing the last five years, I’m not sure we could have paid the bill.”
Girls wrestling
Although barely a third of the way toward securing the 100 member schools needed to be recognized by the PIAA as an official sport, Wednesday’s meeting provided a big step in the right direction for those who want to see girls wrestling sanctioned in Pennsylvania.
There are 34 PIAA member schools with a girls wrestling program — up from only nine a year ago — and the sport could be on track to being officially sanctioned in the near future. But for now, the PIAA has approved an Emerging Sport Program Application for girls wrestling — the first sport to be granted status as an “emerging sport” in Pennsylvania.
“They have (emerging sport status) at the NCAA level, so being good thieves, we stole a lot of the policy language that they have in the NCAA and applied it to Pennsylvania,” said PIAA wrestling steering committee chairman Mark Byers. “I think this emerging sport status is intended to provide our membership with knowledge that it’s something on the horizon.”