St. Joseph to bring back wrestling as high school’s 15th sport

Twenty-four years after dropping the sport, St. Joseph High School announced during its Open House on Sunday that it will be reinstating its wrestling program beginning with the 2018-19 season.

“We’ve been toying with the idea and it’s kind of been coming down the road,” St. Joseph athletics director Mike Murray said, noting students have expressed an interest in participating in the sport. “There’s definitely a percentage of kids in the building who would certainly be willing to pick it up or are interested in picking it up. We want to make sure we are providing everything our kids want to be competing in.”

St. Joseph currently offers 14 sports programs, five of which compete during the winter season, when wrestling is contested.

Murray said he believes the school has enough multi-sport students on campus to make the wrestling program successful without diluting other winter sports programs including basketball, ice hockey and swimming, all of which won Greater Middlesex Conference Tournament championships last year.

Rutgers University head wrestling coach Scott Goodale was pleased to learn that another high school in New Jersey, which is renowned as a grappling hotbed, is adding the sport.

“Any time you can bring wrestling into the curriculum at the high school level, it’s a really big deal,” Goodale said. “I’m assuming they (the Falcons) are bringing it back because there’s interest. It’s a great sport — obviously I’m biased — for so many reasons including the discipline and character that are built. Everybody, at some point in their lives, should partake in wrestling.”

Ron Mazzola, longtime chair of the GMC Wrestling Tournament seeding committee and Region V ranking chairman, said he recalls St. Joseph fielding competitive teams on the mats in the mid- to late-1980s before the school’s participation numbers in the sport began to decline.

“I knew St. Joe’s wrestling when they were really strong and I know that in the early 1990s they canceled the program,” Mazzola said.

St. Joseph fielded its last wrestling team during the 1992-93 season, according to Alyssa Davis, the school’s director of communications. That year, the Falcons struggled to fill the upper weights, according to St. Joseph’s last head wrestling coach, Don Bryner, who currently is in his 36th year as an English teacher at the high school. 

“At that point I wish we had football because I could always feed off of that,” said Bryner, noting the school’s addition of a gridiron program eight years ago will make the next St. Joseph head wrestling coach’s job easier.

“We were a small team. I mean that literally and figuratively. We were heavier in the lighter weights. We did what we could do with what we had.”

Goodale, who was a head wrestling coach and assistant football coach at Jackson Memorial before taking over the Scarlet Knights, said he believed schools with gridiron and grappling programs can enjoy success in both sports.

“Football and wrestling go hand-in-hand.” Goodale said. “I’m speaking from experience. When I was at Jackson, that’s the way it was. There’s no coincidence we had really successful programs (in both sports) because of it.”

With the 2018-19 campaign being the first in a two-year scheduling cycle for the GMC, it is unclear if St. Joseph would compete as a league member or an independent in its first season. It is also unclear if the high school will compete solely on the jayvee level for its first season as the Falcons did on the football field with the gridiron program’s inception in 2010. An announcement of St. Joseph’s head wrestling coach is pending.

“Whatever St. Joe’s does, they don’t do it half-heartedly,” said Mazzola, noting the school’s fledgling football program needs just two more victories to clinch its third White Division title in five years. “I think they are going to go into this full bore, which is a good thing.”

Mazzola said he believes St. Joseph, being a regional school, will benefit from its ability to draw student-athletes from across Central Jersey and beyond.

“To build it quickly, they have a great advantage, because they are not bound by geography,” he said. “They can attract from far and wide. I think if there’s perhaps a football player/wrestler who hasn’t gone there because he hasn’t been able to wrestle, that student-athlete might be more apt to go there now. I think they have the potential to build this quickly.”

Murray, who also is the school’s head baseball coach, said at least one of his former players, 2017 graduate Anthony Favor, was a standout wrestler who had to give up the sport upon transferring to St. Joseph from J.F. Kennedy.

“He said,” Murray recalled, “the hardest thing for me was giving up wrestling to come to St. Joe’s.” 

Goodale said the addition of a St. Joseph wrestling program is good for the sport, whose participation numbers at the scholastic level have declined each of the past four seasons, both nationally and in New Jersey, according to the National Federation of State High School Association’s annual participation survey.

The sport has lost 24,710 participants and 39 teams nationally from 2013-14 to 2016-17. During that span, New Jersey had 1,056 fewer wrestlers and seven fewer wrestling teams.

“Wrestling has become unbelievably specialized and kids don’t want to participate because the guys that are really good are doing it year round,” Goodale said. “Fifteen years ago you could take a kid out of the hallway and be able to find success. That doesn’t happen anymore. That’s the reason why I truly believe the numbers are down. That’s why kids don’t want to participate.

“More schools need to focus on having more sports and more activities to keep kids at school. I would like to see more administrators follow suit and add wrestling.”

Wrestling was the seventh-most popular sport among male individuals and eighth-most popular team sport among males nationally last year, according to national federation statistics.

“The interest has always been there,” Bryner said of wrestling at St. Joseph. “Now that there’s a new administration, it sounds like getting wrestling back would complete the athletic atmosphere.”