Armstrong Wrestling Shoots for Success in Second Season

by Jake DeLuca

The Armstrong River Hawks varsity wrestling program is looking a little bit different since star senior Jacob Robb graduated and took his talents to Mercyhurst University, but even with that departure River Hawks Head Coach Brandon Newill thinks his team can compete just as well as last year.

“We have a lot of guys who can be successful, it’s just having the chips fall as they may kind of thing. Just hard work and letting everything else fall into place,” Newill said.

Over the summer Coach Newill and several members of the wrestling team attended a camp to sharpen their skills - along with the camp this summer the team also worked a lot on conditioning and weight lifting.

“In the off-season we focus on getting stronger, lifting, running, and trying to get your body in the best shape it can be in, because (wrestling) is one of those sports where you have to be in shape. We focused on wrestling, went to camp this summer and every one of those kids had a good experience and got better, and we had a large chunk of our team go with us and that’s good. In my experience the more you can get your team to stay together the better they are going to be,” Newill said.

Before coaching at Armstrong Brandon was the Head Coach at Kittanning where he coached Jason Nolf (now at Penn State) and Jacob Robb (now at Mercyhurst) - a couple of guys you could count on for a victory, this year Newill believes he has some kids with the same kind of drive.

“I think we have got a lot of guys like that (Jason Nolf, Jacob Robb) who have been around for a while. Austin Pinkerton is there, Matt Vukovich had a great season last year, Donovan Ashe is coming back this year from an injury and he’s been working really hard in the off-season. We’ve got a lot of guys who have wrestled for a while like Derek Grafton, we have freshman coming up – we have Isaac Ridinger now who has broke into the line up at 160 lbs.,” Newill said.

Lat year Newill said the team finished around .500 which he thought was nice for their first year against bigger competition, this year the competition didn’t get any smaller, but Coach Newill believes his kids are capable of anything if they are ready.

“We are wrestling much bigger schools and those schools are all tough. We have to come every day with our A game or we’re going to see what happens when we don’t. There are so many schools in our division like Plum, Gateway, and Woodland Hills and they are all big schools so we have to be ready. Last year Woodland Hills impressed me at sections, they had a lot of guys do really well, so we have to be ready,” Newill said.

Armstrong’s next two matches will be at home against Penn Hills on December 21 and then the River Hawks will be hosting a tournament on December 28-29.

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