Range of Emotions
Milano rebounds with revenge on Hale to make 3rd-place match
HERSHEY » The wrestling rollercoaster took Joey Milano on a wild ride this weekend.
But it didn’t dump the SpringFord out of his car. Instead, Milano positioned himself for a potentially upgraded experience at the PIAA Class AAA Tournament.
Milano headed the five-man local contingent qualifying for Saturday’s medal matches, which ended after this edition’s deadline. The standout junior will go for third place at 182, facing Nazareth’s
Drew Clearie.
Milano will be joined on the medal stand by teammates Jack McGill and Louie Carbajal. Both will be wrestling for seventhplace medals: McGill (44-9) at 152 against Central Dauphin’s Tye Weathersby, Carbajal (30-14) against CD’s Jackson Talbott.
“Coming out of here with three medals ... that’s fantastic,” SF head coach Tim Seislove said. “They all wrestled tough. They showed a lot of heart.”
A pair of Owen J. Roberts seniors, Antonio Petrucelli and Connor Quinn, are also going for
medals. Quinn made the fifth-place match at 160 while Petrucelli made the seventh-place match at 145, ensuring his second PIAA medal.
Milano displayed a ton of heart in rebounding from a quarterfinal-loss to Gerrit Nijenhuis, a senior from Canon-McMillan and Class AAA’s 2019 170-pound state champion Friday. He opened Saturday with a 5:00 technical fall of Easton’s Isaiah Reimert, putting him up against Downingtown West’s Maximus Hale to get into third-place bout.
It was Hale who handed Milano (47-2) his first loss of the season in last weekend’s South East AAA Regional 182-pound title bout. This time, Milano took charge early.
Milano got 3-1 lead before Hale tied the match at 3-3 in the closing minute of regulation. He worked for a takedown of Hale as time expired in overtime, but couldn’t get it done ahead of the clock. He worked an escape for the bottom in the second OT, then kept pressure on Hale rest of way to consign the Whippet upper weight to the fifth-place match.
“Joey came back and got a nice win on Hale,” Seislove noted.
McGill was topped by HatboroHorsham’s A.J. Tamburrino 6-3, while Carbajal lost to Delaware Valley’s Jason Henderson 7-1. Those setbacks didn’t diminish the significance of both qualifying for state medals in their first experience in the state’s individual tournament.
“Louie and Joe wrestled fantastic,” Seislove noted.
A pair of Owen J. Roberts seniors, Antonio Petrucelli and Connor Quinn, are also going for medals.
Quinn (33-5) will go against Waynesburg Central’s Luca Augustine for fifth place. He opened Saturday with 4-3 decision of Council Rock North’s Dillon Sheehy, then went up against Kiski Area’s Jack Blumer to get into third-place bout, only to lose 9-1.
“Connor is an artist. What he does out there is magical,” Owen J head coach Steve DeRafelo said. “I sit there in awe of what he does.”
Petrucelli (39-6) will face Antonio Amelio of Seneca Valley in the 145 seventh-place bout. He was placed there after coming up short of Franklin Regional’s Mason Spears in the fourth round of consolations.
“Antonio is a real blue-collar kid,” OJR head coach Steve DeRafelo said. “He loves to work. He’s willing to do the hard stuff.
“These are two awesome kids to coach. They’ve experienced some losses up here, but they don’t realize how many kids haven’t experienced this. They can’t appreciate yet what they’ve accomplished in their high school careers, but it will happen.”