How's your high school football season going?

Haven't done this for a few years, but I have fun with it.

The weekend's four Pennsylvania (PIAA) state championship games at Hersheypark Stadium. "The sweetest place on Earth," intones ageless PA announcer Bob Schellenberg.

CLASS AAAA: Saint Joseph's Prep (11-3) vs. Pittsburgh Central Catholic (15-0), 6 p.m. Saturday.

OK, off the top, the two big-school classes will feature four parochial schools. The public vs. private debate intensifies again.

Saint Joseph's Prep belongs to Philadelphia's vaunted Catholic League. The Hawks defeated nearby Neshaminy 37-21 Saturday. QB Chris Martin missed two games with a knee injury but is back. He's the successor to Skyler Mornhinweg, now at Florida.

WPIAL champ Central Catholic is loaded defensively. It held a 13-1 Lower Dauphin team to 6 offensive yards and a single first down in a 45-0 shutoutin the western final. LB Niko Thorpe will play on TV someday. So could DL Zach DeLuca, if he's not wrestling in D-I. You might know the father of WR Shafer Swann, who caught a TD pass Saturday.

Pick: Central Catholic 14, Saint Joseph's Prep 3.

CLASS AAA: Harrisburg Bishop McDevitt (14-1) vs. Archbishop Wood (12-2), 7 p.m. Friday.

These two teams met in the AAA final two seasons back. Wood, 52-0. It won't be that bad this time.

McDevitt is consistently getting the Harrisburg area's top talent. Junior RB Andre Robinson will be a prized recruiting commodity next year; same for flashy WR Kobay White in 2016. Robinson had 372 all-purpose yards in the Crusaders' stirring 47-42 comeback victoryover Erie Cathedral Prep in Saturday's western final. Defense has been gashed the last two weeks. Playing 20 minutes from home.

Wood, another Philly Catholic League bully, ruined the hopes of a classic McDevitt-Berwick finals matchup. The Vikings stomped Berwick 42-14 in Allentown. Soph QB Tom Garlick is already a second-year starter; TE/LB Jake Cooper and OT Ryan Bates, both juniors, have handfuls of D-I offers in their pocket.

Pick: Archbishop Wood 28, Bishop McDevitt 20.

CLASS AA: Imhotep (13-2) vs. South Fayette (15-0), noon Saturday.

If you are seeing a Philly/Pittsburgh slant to this year's finals, good eye. Three teams each out of eight overall.

That's Imhotep Institute Charter High School to you, mister, and it will become the first Philly Public League school to play for a state football title. (The school is already an established state basketball power.) The Panthers shut out Berks Catholic 20-0 Saturday. They have three good runners in Tyliek Raynor, the breakaway threat, and power guys Nasir Bonner and Mike Waters. And, well, they have friggin' neon in their helmet scheme.



South Fayette lies about 15 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. The Lions made it to Hershey three years ago, losing 50-14 to Philly West Catholic. This edition is led by junior QB Brett Brumbaugh; his brother Christian quarterbacked the 2010 club and is now a backup at William & Mary. South Fayette beat Hickory (not the fictitious Indiana basketball school) 23-20 in Saturday's western final.

Pick: Imhotep 24, South Fayette 7.

CLASS A: Old Forge (14-1) vs. Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic (15-0), 1 p.m. Friday.

Old Forge pizza is some of the greatest stuff on Earth. The town, tucked between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, is making its first trip to the finals, but the football team has been a player in the east for a few years now. When the Blue Devils get going, it's behind workhorse RB Brandon Yescavage. He had 143 yards on 38 carries Saturday as Old Forge beat an athletic Steel-High team 26-7. Nasty defense for a small school, and it may be a team of destiny.

Four-time champ Clairton was knocked off by Sto-Rox in the WPIAL semifinals, and North Catholic took care of the Rox the following weekend. The Trojans trot out an offensive line that's better than a Class A team should have. It paved the way for 376 rushing yards -- 178 by junior RB Jerome Turner -- in a 39-12 romp over Clarion on Saturday in the western final.

Pick: North Catholic 35, Old Forge 14.

 

Hate those multi-colored helmets. Guess it's a sign of the times, of course. Wonder if Penn State or Notre Dame will ever go that route?

 

We have state semifinalists in Class 3A Division I, Class 2A Division II, Class 1A Division I and Class 1A Division II. Two of the four are defending state champs. Both reloaded after significant graduation losses.

We also have a Six-Man Division I state finalist. This is a school of maybe 80 students from a community of less than 300. The game will be played at 80,000-seat AT&T Stadium.

 

Went went 0-for-5 in the state championships, but the coverage was well-received.

We'll work to get the All-Area team into the paper at some point during Christmas week. Be here before you know it.

For next week, I'll ask each of the writers who covered games for us this season - that's about 10, off the top of my head - to write 100 words or so on their favorite moment(s) from the past season. Makes a nice page.

 

We went 3-for-3. Interestingly, we got more compliments on our Twitter updates than on the print coverage. Sign of the times, I guess.

And, yes, now it's All-Area time, and I've already had one coach call my personal cell phone to lobby for one of his guys for first-team. I agreed with him, BTW.

 

I loved doing the all-area team on Christmas (or day after) when I was in a football-heavy area. Other places, we did athlete of the year in that slot. Gave us something good to anchor the section with.

One of my pet peeves was conferences --- high school or college --- who don't get around to doing their all-star teams till sometime in mid-January. One administrator once told me "it's too hard to get everyone to vote over Christmas break". Fine, do it prior to that. You don't have to wait til the final horn sounds to figure out who the best players are. By mid-January, I've moved on to other sports and I suspect the majority of the readership has as well. If you can't get it to us within a week of the season's end, I'm not giving it prime coverage.

 

Our version of All-State team falls out of the sky today in the form of six handwritten, faxed pages. Just lovely - for 1993.

 

Better than getting a fax of a page typed in a word document, where you know they could've just attached it to an email.

 

At least you were actually able to track the damn things down. Our local coaches got us their respective winners and a couple of the teams, but finding the entire lists has been like trying to procure nuclear launch codes.

 

Batman,

Tell 'em to screw that. It's like these partial game reports we talked about with only names for one team. Either get the entire team list or we ain't runnin' nuttin.

 

I went round-and-round with the coaches association people over that, accused them of being lazy and secretive. Pissed 'em off something royal.

So then I took 90 minutes and typed them all up and stuck them on my blog. You'd think I'd split the atom based on the reaction from some readers and parents from across the state.

 

I was fine with what they gave us. We're a small paper that primarily focuses on a half-dozen public schools spread across four classifications, so we're really only concerned with the locals. The entire list is nice to run on agate with the stories on the local guys who made it, but it's not the end of the world if we don't get it. We don't have a Class 2A school, for example, in our circulation area, so nobody's going to care if we do or don't run the Class 2A All-State list.