Glad you’re here Rover. A true D11 representer. Would you like to discuss wrestling ?
I'd love to! I try to discuss wrestling all the time on this board, including musings on the transfer culture up here, what it's done to the health of the sport (my alma mater included) and how the two Catholic schools up here have really blown things up in ways that have reverberated all over the state.
Anyway, since I'm living in a glass house here, let's talk Easton. The "big bang" of wrestling transfers was Whitey Chlebove leaving Whitehall for his senior year to go to Northampton in 1993, where he won a state title and Northampton finished #1 in the country. So using '93-'94 as a starting point, here's a comprehensive history of Easton wrestling transfers.
Willie Saylor grew up in Wilson and went to Easton for high school. For context, Wilson Borough is a ten or so block radius (about one square mile) within the city of Easton that has its own school district. The high school is across the street from Easton Area High School.
Eric Greshko left East Stroudsburg to wrestle for Easton in 1995 - he was a state finalist in '95 and state 3rd in '96, and very famously pinned Adam Tirapelle at Reno in '96 which went a long way to Easton winning that tournament and claiming the national #1 ranking.
The Ciasulli family built a house in Palmer Township near Easton Area High School in the late '90s when their oldest boy, Andy, was in 8th grade. Their daughter was a senior at P'burg when they moved and finished out high school there, the boys started at Easton schools with Andy in 9th, Matt in 6th, and Seth in 3rd. The boys won 8 state medals, with Matt being a 3x state champ and Seth a 2x state finalist. Their dad ran the Red Hawk wrestling school, which will remain a character in our story.
Bryan Rizzo left Southern Lehigh to wrestle at Easton in 2001 and took 5th in the state.
Sean Richmond '04 had a parent who lived in Emmaus and a parent who lived in Easton, and pulled the classic move in with the other parent for high school. He won two state medals and was on Easton's staff as their top assistant for years before becoming the head coach and athletic director at Stroudsburg.
Marcus Millen is always the subject of weird debate - they live on a big compound of land in Riegelsville, which attends Easton schools, there were always accusations that the house was actually in Palisades. Either way, he spent his freshman year at Bethlehem Catholic before coming to Easton as a sophomore in 2002.
Mike Rogers was a Red Hawk wrestling kid and training partner with the Ciasulli brothers. He and his mom left Warren Hills to live in Easton before he started 9th grade. He won two state titles.
Jordan Nettuno was from Hunterdon Central lived in the apartment above Jack Cuvo's Wrestling Warehouse to spend just his junior year at Easton, then moved back when that clearly wasn't working out.
Sal Crivellaro attended Easton schools from kindergarten through 10th grade when he got beat out for the running back job by a fellow sophomore. For his junior year, he went to Bethlehem Catholic to play football and wrestle. Following football season his senior year, he dropped out of Becahi and came back to Easton and wrestled that winter.
Anthony Innarella left Freedom for Easton as a senior in '03 and was in-and-out of the lineup.
The coach at Wilson assaulted a kid and had a very large and very public abuse investigation - Kegan Handlovic and Russ Souders both left Wilson following the incident and enrolled at Easton schools. Souders had been a state finalist at Wilson and spent his senior year at Easton, while Handlovic was a sophomore and went on to win two state titles for the Rovers as Jordan Oliver's training partner.
Alex Meade had his transfer denied by D11 after coming to Easton from Caesar Rodney, Delaware in a long, convoluted story - he left Delaware to wrestle at Christiansburg, Virginia for NCAA champ Daryl Weber, but his family didn't go, he just moved in with Weber (or maybe an assistant). Virginia caught wind and declared him ineligible. So he moved back in with his parents in October - but the state of Delaware said he was a transfer from Virginia to Delaware for athletic purposes and made him ineligible for coming back to his home school. He's Jordan Oliver's cousin, so his mom reached out to her sister, and the rented an apartment in Easton so the boys could go to school and wrestle together. That also got shot down at the District hearing level, so Meade finished out the year at Easton without wrestling, then went home to Delaware. He and Jordan ended up in the Oklahoma State recruiting class together.
Mason McIntyre's dad got fired as the wrestling coach at Freedom before his senior season. He and his dad both came over to Easton for the 2011 season.
Currently, Ben Fanelli was at Pleasant Valley in 7th grade when he won Junior High Districts.
I think I got everybody over the last 30 years? There were always crazy rumors but Zeke Lane, Mikey Racciato, Dave Richmond, Nick Guida, Bryan Reiss, Mario Stuart, Keanu Dillard, Jeremy Cresswell, et al never went to Easton despite serving up tons of message board fodder and speculation.
I do know that when Matt Veres (the current Notre Dame coach) interviewed for the Easton job in 2016 he arrived at the interview with a list of kids that he would bring with him to Easton if he was hired for the job, only one of who, future state champ Brandan Chletsos, actually lived in Easton. That was a big part of why he wasn't hired - that list became his first rosters at Notre Dame.
The early '00s in particular were nuts for wrestling transfers up here. I also know that it nearly killed D11 wrestling for years - culminating in the 2014 season where there were unthinkably no state champs from D11 is a direct result of the damage the transfer-fest did to so many feeder programs and non-Power 3 schools, there was just not the depth beyond them to sustain an ecosystem. Then you brought in Bethlehem Catholic on top of it with no rules whatsoever to hoover up everybody and the bottom for a while there. There has been a lot of hard and careful work by a lot of people to build that ecosystem back up with places like Dark Knights in the Poconos, Grit in Saucon Valley, Jon Trenge's work with the LVWC youth and Beat the Streets partly to compete with what Becahi and Notre Dame were doing using Weaver then Red Hawk and Lost Boys to build rosters off of the club system. With a coaching change at Becahi and Veres poisoning the well on his recruiting territory, I think it is possible you're going to see a swing back to competitiveness in the Valley - beyond just Nazareth who dipped massively into the transfer game - that you haven't since the late '90s. Things like the two stud freshman from Emmaus actually ending up at Emmaus, Easton getting back to their level with a fully homegrown lineup, are signs that it's turning. But make no mistake, what Easton, Nazareth, and Northampton did twenty years ago still has negative reverberations for the sport.
