McGuffey, Dalton looking for WPIAL title
Ever since taking over at McGuffey in 2012, Ed Dalton has steadily transformed the Class 2A No. 2 Highlanders into one of the WPIAL’s most consistent programs.
Last year, McGuffey boasted one of the WPIAL’s most dominant defenses, allowing only 11 points per game on its way to its first outright conference title since 1994. But the Highlanders couldn’t quite muster enough offense in a 21-14 loss vs. Serra Catholic in the WPIAL Class 2A quarterfinals, and the one item Dalton has yet to check off his coaching bucket list continued to elude him — a WPIAL championship.
“Would that be something I would love? Absolutely,” Dalton said. “But I think I’m at the age that I would love it for the players way more. What keeps me going is, I just don’t do anything else. This is my life.”
Running a variation of the wing-T option offense, McGuffey averaged 35 points per game last year while finishing 6-1 in the regular season, with its only loss coming in a 27-20 defeat at Linsly School, W.Va. A 7-6 win in the season opener vs. rival Washington proved to be the difference in securing the school’s first outright conference championship in 27 years.
As always, Dalton expects the conference to come down to a heated battle between the Highlanders and the school he simply calls ‘W.’ This time around, the familiar foes will meet in the season finale, and Dalton expects a lot more scoring out of his offense to complement his team’s punishing, smash-mouth defense.
“Our philosophy the last four years has been, we’re going to play offense on defense,” Dalton said. “We’re not going to wait for you to run your offense. We’re going to make you block our defense. On occasion, that backfires and they hit big plays against you, but we’ve found out that the kids love to play that way.”
McGuffey returns a pair of explosive ball carriers in senior fullback Jeremiah Johnson (6-2, 215) and junior tailback Kyle Brookman. Both Johnson and Brookman averaged more than 11 yards per attempt, with Brookman rushing for 344 yards on 31 carries and Johnson piling up 225 yards on 18 carries. Brookman also led the team with five catches for 116 yards and scored a team- high 11 touchdowns as a sophomore.
At quarterback, junior Philip McCuen will be tasked with orchestrating the offense and making the right read before every snap based on what the defense is showing. McCuen ran for 70 yards and three scores on only eight carries in backup quarterback duty last season.
“We’re taking consistent steps. We started where we were always .500 or a game above, now we seem to be 73, 8-2 or 9-1, something like that, all the time,” Dalton said. “Our expectations definitely are different than when we first arrived as a staff.”
After earning his 200th career coaching win last season — having coached at five different schools across 34 years to get there — Dalton added another member of the 200-win club to his coaching staff for his 35th year. Guy Montecalvo, who won 225 games in 30 years as head coach at Washington and Canon-McMillan, has joined Dalton’s staff as an assistant to help implement new wrinkles into the team’s wing-T offense.
Dalton is always looking for ways to keep things fresh and innovative while staying true to his oldschool philosophy, and his methods have paid off by developing the Highlanders into a perennial contender in Class 2A. In order to take the next step and truly establish McGuffey as one of the WPIAL’s elite programs, though, Dalton
knows he has to bring the school a WPIAL championship — a journey he hopes to begin with a win against rival Southmoreland in Friday’s season opener.
Doing so would offset the Scotties’ preferred nickname for the Highlanders, as they now refer to their rivals as the Bills instead — a jab at McGuffey’s perceived inability to win “the big one.” The nickname originated as a response to a postgame crack from Dalton after beating Southmoreland in 2019, in which he said, “The Browns are still the Browns.”
“I noticed they’re tweeting that they’re going to welcome their friends from Buffalo Township with a blackout,” Dalton said. “It’s a really good rivalry, and we respect the heck out of their coaches. They’ve done a great job of taking a blip in the radar and turning it into a program. We expect nothing but a great game on Friday.”
West Greene
After a 10-win season that included a WPIAL semifinal appearance in 2019, the Pioneers took a slight step back last year, finishing 4-3 overall and narrowly missing out on a playoff berth in the COVIDshortened 2020 season.
That minor regression could largely be attributed to the graduation of recordsetting running back Ben Jackson, who ran for 3,076 yards and 50 touchdowns as a senior in 2019.
In his place, Colin Brady stepped in and performed admirably as a freshman, rushing for 823 yards and 11 touchdowns while averaging nearly 10 yards per carry. Now a 6-foot-2, 185pound sophomore, Brady will look to cement himself as West Greene’s next star tailback with a big performance in the opening week.
The Pioneers will be traveling out of state for their Week 0 matchup, but it won’t be that far of a trip — it should only take the team about a half hour to make the 21.5-mile trek to Cameron, W.Va., to take on the Dragons.
Ligonier Valley
With 10 starters returning on both sides of the ball, many are expecting big things out of the Rams in their second year back in the WPIAL following 50 years in District 6.
Ligonier Valley finished 4-3 in 2020, and like West Greene, the Rams missed out on a postseason berth due to the smaller playoff field. Making the switch to an entirely new district after graduating 16 seniors the year before certainly made the adjustment even more of a challenge, but things should be much smoother for Ligonier Valley in 2021.
The Rams open up the season on the road against Class 4A opponent Indiana and standout running back Devin Flint, one of the top returning rushers in the WPIAL. Ligonier Valley will look to counter with a potent rushing attack of its own, as junior quarterback Haden Sierocky and senior running back Nick Beitel each surpassed 600 yards on the ground last season.