Battle of independent schools brings focus on programs looking to rebuild
Story by Jonathan Callard. Art by Sophia Lucente.
NewsWorks Lab contributors
Editor's note: NewsWorks Lab has embedded with the Baldwin football team for the 2026 season to document its departure from the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL) for an independent schedule. The Highlanders, which compete in WPIAL Class 5A, had not won a game in their past three seasons. This series includes previous stories about the state of high school football across Pennsylvania, surging rosters in some communities and a look at Baldwin's start to the season.
Leaving the WPIAL football conference often means also leaving western Pennsylvania.
For Baldwin, which dropped out this fall to play an independent schedule, they must drive nearly three hours to Blair County to face Hollidaysburg. The Golden Tigers would compete in the PIAA’s central Pennsylvania District 6 – except they, too, make their own schedule.
For senior Anthony Petro, 17, the trip opens his eyes: He never has ventured this far east from Pittsburgh before.
When his teammate Cody Trifanoff makes a thirty-yard reception, the twenty people wearing purple shirts in the stands – the Baldwin fans who made the trip – explode into cheers.
“I don’t want to sit on a bus for two hours,” Trifanoff, 17, says. “But at the end of the day, I just want to play football.”
Baldwin dropped out of the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League for at least this and the next seasons because school officials felt like the boys were overmatched in the PIAA Class 5A Allegheny Six Conference. The team set its own schedule while seeking to rebuild its program.
This Friday, Baldwin plays Butler, the only other WPIAL team going independent. At 3-3, the Golden Tornado are coming off their third-straight defeat, and yet, they symbolize what Baldwin might become with more than 50 players – or double the amount from when they went independent six years ago – and coming off their first winning season since 1997.
“This is a WPIAL problem,” Baldwin middle school coach Mike Stolarz says on the sidelines in Hollidaysburg. “If Aliquippa is going to be moved up for competitive balance, then why can’t teams like us that are rebuilding move down? It’s not right.”
The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association slots teams across the commonwealth based on the number of students in grades 9 through 11 – and moves up teams like Aliquippa into bigger conferences based on repeated postseason success.
Baldwin had not won a single game in any of the past three seasons and its roster had fallen to 24 active players – more comparable to schools in the smaller A and 2A conferences.
Baldwin’s superintendent Randy Lutz responds to those who criticize his team for leaving the WPIAL by pointing to his own imposing size. He recalls a reporter from the student newspaper asking him why the team couldn’t compete.
“He was about this big,” Lutz says, lowering his hand to his hip. “I said, ‘All right. How about we do this? For the next 30 minutes, I’m gonna tackle you. I’m 6-foot-7. For 30 minutes after that, you can tackle me. And after an hour, I want to see how you feel.’”
Lutz said he feels a lack of support from both the WPIAL and the PIAA.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think they have the courage,” he says. “I’m not being critical. That’s a big change.”
PIAA chief operating officer Pat Gebhart said he understands Baldwin’s situation, but the athletic association’s board has never seriously considered relegation, where schools like Baldwin would go down in classification while remaining in the WPIAL to square off against squads closer to their roster size and ability.
“It may be a slippery slope when you offer that to schools,” he said. “What criteria must they meet in order to qualify for relegation? I think it’s a difficult formula to come up with.”
The long trip to Hollidaysburg does not help Baldwin’s season record despite the effort.
Taking advantage of an early dismissal day, the team left Baldwin at 2:50 p.m. and arrived at 5:30 p.m. They didn’t get home that night until 12:30 a.m.
“We needed 8 drivers to drop everyone off,” Lutz said. “Three different trailers: cheerleaders, band, and football. That makes it really hard to do school on a day like that.”
Baldwin lost 49-12.
Youth movement
By stepping away, Baldwin – like Butler – hopes to reboot its program through a long-term strategy focused on young players.
Baldwin fans glimpsed the future earlier in the season: In only his third high school game, junior quarterback Sadiq Anderson, 16, connected for a beautiful 29-yard reception with freshman Gavin Saccani, 14, in the waning minutes of a 24-10 loss to City League’s Brashear.
Despite standing just 5-foot-6, 125 pounds, Saccani “plays big,” Stolarz says. A highly touted prospect, he chose to attend Baldwin rather than compete for successful Pittsburgh-area parochial programs like Seton LaSalle and Central Catholic. The younger brother of former Baldwin standout Noah Saccani, who taught him everything he knows, Gavin trains regularly at a neighborhood turf field.
Still, Baldwin head coach Dana Brown Jr. – “Coach Dane” to the boys – wants to change the culture now.
After a win against Carrick that snapped a 30-game losing streak and saw students storm the field, Baldwin dropped its next two games. Brown asked for leaders to step up. The team re-voted captains.
“Y’all too comfortable,” Brown yells in the locker room, down 24-7 at halftime against Windber the following week. “Y’all satisfied with one win. One win. One win. One!”
He paces in front of players slumped around him in the locker room.
“We had a reason we were going independent,” Brown says. “Show them that we mean it. Show ‘em!”
He walks out of the room.
The team blanks Windber in the second half. Petro takes a punt 89 yards for a touchdown, electrifying the crowd, including Highlander parent Joe Summerfield.
“You want to be out here on Friday nights,” he says. “You have little kids going. They’re watching these guys and saying, ‘Well, I’m going to be him when I get older.’ That’s what builds it.”
The Baldwin Whitehall Athletic Association has started bringing young boys to hang around the high school team, and brothers James and Nicky Glick, 10 and 9 years old, have been working as water boys. James hopes to play for the Highlanders someday; Nicky wears the same number 52 as senior Richard Zwolinski, 17.
Homecoming
Before Baldwin’s homecoming game against Preston, W.Va., last week, roles reversed: High school lineman Ali Shure, a 17-year-old junior, joined some of his teammates to cheer on the middle school JV football team at the stadium.
After dark that night, on the baseball diamond, firefighters doused a mountain of wood with gasoline and someone in the crowd shouted, “Light the fire!” as the pile burst into flames.
Shure’s family came to Baldwin from Afghanistan in 2018.
“I remember in middle school, we had a game before or after practice, and the older guys would come to our game,” he said. “There was one who gave us a speech. It fired us up. It was like, this is what we gotta do.”
At the pep rally in the gym a couple days before the bonfire, Leena Gurung, 16, cheered for Shure and his teammates. Her family is part of the district’s sizable Nepali/Bhutanese immigrant population. Foreign-born students boost Baldwin’s overall census, even though many did not grow up around American sports like their classmates.
Baldwin honors its newcomers with an annual “We Are Neighbors” event designed to build community.
“We do our dancing,” Gurung said. “We give out food that’s from our culture.”
She also has attended football games this season.
“They really do try hard,” she said of the players. “There are some things to work on. They have passion.”
Unfortunately for the Baldwin athletes, will alone rarely turns to winning. But Brown isn’t just focused on wins and losses. How to instill pride for yourself, your football brothers, school and community? This must come from the players themselves – not from him.
Petro leads the offense for the third quarter of the homecoming game. He and junior Max Galentine, 17, the so-called “Swiss Army knife,” have been platooning at the position tonight since Anderson, the starting quarterback, injured his ankle days earlier.
During a timeout, Brown grabs Petro’s helmet.
“I need you to get fifteen yards,” he says.
Petro keeps the ball on the next play, and he runs for a first down. With his legs and arm, he drives the Highlanders downfield. Senior Mikko Kustron, 17, rumbles in for a touchdown.
The Highlanders hold Preston to just one score in the second half, but their own offense sputters. They lose 28-6, dropping the Highlanders’ record to 1-5.
“The next four weeks, they’re going to challenge you,” Brown says to the team, standing in front of them in the end zone.
“Touch somebody,” he says.
The players place hands on each other’s shoulders.
During the game, middle school football players picked up the orange traffic cone that junior lineman Jack Zugates, 16, carries for good luck. He even had it blessed by a priest. The younger boys paraded it up the sidelines, following the team down the field.
The high school players took notice.
“Watching us, they saw themselves,” Shure said. “It makes me work harder. It shows me how hard I should show these kids to work, to bring them up to another level, so they can beat me.”
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Jonathan Callard and Sophia Lucente are contributors to NewsWorks Lab.
Copyright NewsWorksLab, LLC 2026
