Highlanders leave WPIAL for independent schedule and a path back to winning
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 and two upcoming stories about Baldwin in October and November.
August 28, 4:45 p.m. Thirty players ride the bus that pulls out of the Baldwin High School parking lot. No one speaks. These boys have chosen to suit up for the Baldwin Highlanders’ first game against the Plum Mustangs tonight. After Plum, Baldwin will play an independent schedule against schools outside of the WPIAL. By creating its own competition, the school hopes to rejuvenate a program that hasn’t won anything in three years and is regularly routed by fellow 5A schools.
Seventeen-year-old senior Anthony Petro—or “AP,” for short—sits in the back. The Highlanders’ top receiver, he was jawing back and forth with an opponent last year when he lost his cool and grabbed the guy’s facemask and threw him to the ground, yanking his helmet off. Then he struck the player’s head. Someone recorded the incident and it went viral. AP was suspended for the season. He apologized to his teammates, coaches, and school. He shut off his phone and social media after vicious attacks. Now Petro is back. The team has given him another chance. As co-captain, he’s returning the favor, leading by example.
“I just love football. When I look at everyone around me, I think it’s the same way with all of them. They love the team and what we’re building. It’s a brothership. That’s just encouraging people to keep coming.”
– Junior Max Galentine
Junior Max Galentine, 17, sits near the front. He’s the emotional leader, never gets rattled. “Swiss Army Knife,” “Mr. Everything,” they call him. He plays running back, tight end, linebacker. When Baldwin’s quarterback transferred out the middle of last season, Max took over the position. No matter that he’d never played quarterback before. He learned the schemes, calmed the huddle. After guys split into cliques, quit, or transferred, Max helped start a group chat. They gathered outside of practice to go to church together, work out together, eat together. The success of this season depends on how they manage their emotions and form chemistry.
Junior defensive end Dylan Kuczlowski, 16, sits by AP in the back of the bus, headphones on. He’s recruited guys to return to the squad and mentors the linemen, “the Hogs,” nicknamed for their size. AP convinced junior Sadiq Anderson to join as quarterback. While Anderson, 16, hasn’t played football since middle school—he’s starting guard on the basketball team—he throws a tight spiral.
Beyond mindset, the biggest problem is numbers. The Highlanders’ 30-man roster is the size of most single and double-A teams. Those schools have fewer than 199 boys versus 5A schools, like Baldwin, that have more than double that. It’s for that reason—and for the safety of their players—that they will compete against the City League’s Carrick and Brashear, fellow independents Butler and Hollidaysburg, Clearfield County’s DuBois, and West Virginia opponents Preston, Morgantown, and Spring Mills. Departing the WPIAL means that no matter how many games Baldwin wins, the team will not have a postseason. When you’re never leaving the field because you’re playing both offense and defense, it’s a question of how much a body can take before it breaks down.
Brick by brick
5:15 p.m. On I-376, the bus slows to a crawl. Behind the driver, head coach Dana Brown Jr.—“Coach Dane”—rests his head against tattooed forearms. Brown is not a quitter. He learned determination from his father, Baldwin offensive coordinator Dana Brown Sr. When the younger Brown was 5, “Coach Senior” told him to move a pile of bricks over to the wall next to the house and let him know when he was done. The son did what he was told. Brick by brick, sweating. Told him he was done. Then his father told him to move them back. So the son did. “We’re men and Browns,” Senior recalled later. “We do not quit.”
5:45 p.m. The bus regains speed on Route 22. “I’m going to see your heart,” Coach Dane said earlier, anticipating the Plum game. “So you’re hot and you’re tired, and it’s the fourth quarter. Are you going to lay down, like we did before? Or are you going to fight?”
Three weeks ago, Coach Dane held a conditioning contest. Baldwin’s weight room morphed into a mass of sweating bodies moving to music as he separated the team into two groups and pitted one representative against the other in barbell lifts, pullups, and planks. Whistles blowing, everyone yelling, including assistant head coach Jawan Bryant—or “Coach J”. When coaches raise their intensity and get excited, Coach J explained, the players feed off it. Sporting matching “Love Life” tattoos, he and Coach Dane push each other to keep up the energy.
For the final competition, two contestants hold their bodies off the floor for as long as possible while everyone surrounds them, jumping and hollering. Galentine, the “Swiss Army Knife,” triumphs to the cheers of his side. Coach J celebrates with them. The losing group will run. “People only see the bad side” of Baldwin football, Galentine said afterwards. “People see the news. They don’t see us in the weight room encouraging each other. That was the most hyped I’ve seen the players in a while.”
Finding your why
6:00 p.m. Coach Dane stands. “We’re running late. Get ready to move with purpose.”
6:15 p.m. The bus arrives at Plum. The driver opens in the door. Moments later the Highlanders process silently onto the field. They barely get in warmups before opening kickoff.
Even when Plum goes up 7-0, Baldwin athletic director Tony Cherico likes what he sees. Players are making tackles, carrying the energy from an earlier scrimmage against Albert Gallatin. “That’s as good as they looked in the last few years,” Cherico says of the scrimmage. “They looked engaged. They were patting each other on the back. Just looked different. The feel was different.”
For Coach Dane, discovering this feel means “finding your why.” His task, he says, “is to try to get these guys to stay interested. The difficulties that we always have are with the kids where they just want to play. They don’t know what it means to play football.” Helping each person discover his motivation becomes the key to keeping him.
A week before Plum, when tempers flared during practice, Coach Dane called a lineman-only meeting. “We’re a family here,” he said to the Hogs gathered on the field with line coach Lee Barlow, raising his arms in a circle over his head. Kuczlowski, a co-captain and chief Hog, spoke his mind. Others did too. If Coach Dane held preseason practice earlier in the day, demanded they sleep over at the stadium and confiscated their phones, he told them, they might have quit—and he can’t afford to lose anyone. If players know the why, he explained later, then it’s easier for them to buy in. He must navigate holding them accountable while meeting each athlete where he is.
9:15 p.m. The Highlanders’ lack of depth hurts. The game ends at Plum 43, Baldwin 6. They are still finding themselves, still haunted by losing seasons. “I got to be better; the coaches got to be better,” Coach Dane tells the team. “But more importantly, you, the man in the mirror, got to be better.”
No one is happy
September 4, 8:40 p.m. A week later at home, Baldwin is tied 6-6 at halftime against City League school Carrick. No one is happy.
The Highlanders stand in silence before Coach Dane in the locker room. “You need to believe,” he says, smacking his hand with an empty water bottle. “It takes eleven on the field to believe.” The players nod. “You gotta move as a unit. You can’t second-guess nothing.” His voice rises. “You get another 24 minutes to show you ain’t that first-half team.”
In the third quarter, Baldwin football parent and booster president Jamie Jackson exults as her seventeen-year-old son Joe sacks the Carrick quarterback with a vengeance. The Highlanders’ travail “just grows their backbone,” she says. “They’re learning the hard life lessons.” While she’s glad that Joe can experience an independent schedule this year, she wonders why Baldwin must leave the WPIAL to rebuild. Why not move down to match up against schools in lower classifications with comparable rosters?
Cherico, Baldwin's athletic director, has conferred with colleagues at other schools in similar plights about realigning the conference. Cherico understands the other side too: the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA), not the WPIAL, determines classifications; when you make changes for some schools, others lose out geographically and financially. That's especially true for the powerhouses nobody wants to play because they’re so good.
We’re coming
9:10 p.m. Quarterback Sadiq Anderson scores a two-point conversion. Baldwin 20, Carrick 6.
It takes many people to resurrect a program. On the sideline, Baldwin football alum Chad Chilleo watches Baldwin Whitehall Athletic Association (BWAA) youth football player Xavier Davin, 11, hand out water bottles to Highlanders during timeouts. As director of football for the BWAA, which offers tackle and flag football and cheerleading to kids in kindergarten through sixth grade, Chilleo and other BWAA members are talking with Coach Dane and Jackson to reconnect the community’s youngest athletes with the high school. Middle school coach Mike Stolarz shows up with his guys to serve as ball boys and scream support. Stolarz hopes to send 30 eighth graders to Coach Dane next year.
10:15 p.m. Baldwin beats Carrick 29-12, breaking a 30-game losing streak. Baldwin students rush the field, embracing Highlander players.
“You kept fighting,” Coach Dane says to the team. “It feels good, baby. Now we gotta learn how to win,” he shouts. “I’m putting everything on you guys.” The team erupts in a roar. Then, they bow their heads in prayer.
Change doesn’t happen quickly. But Chilleo can see his young proteges competing for the varsity someday. “I want everyone to know that we’re here,” he says. “I want everyone to know that we’re coming.”
10:30 p.m. “I don’t know how to celebrate. I’m still processing it,” Galentine says as his teammates file into the locker room. “I just love football. When I look at everyone around me, I think it’s the same way with all of them,” he adds. “They love the team and what we’re building. It’s a brothership. That’s just encouraging people to keep coming.”
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Jonathan Callard and Sophia Lucente are contributors to NewsWorks Lab.
Copyright NewsWorksLab, LLC 2026
