The WPIAL basketball semifinals are hitting the big picture.
Television station 22 The Point (WPNT) has decided to televise a WPIAL girl-boy semifinal doubleheader Tuesday night from North Allegheny High School. The first game has the South Fayette girls against McKeesport in a Class 5A game at 6 p.m. The second game matches the Mt. Lebanon boys against undefeated North Hills at 8 p.m. in a Class 6A semifinal.
Live television for semifinal games is notable for the WPIAL. A Pittsburgh television station hasn’t carried semifinal games live since the early 1970s, when WQED Channel 13 used to carry many games in the tournament from Civic Arena. Bill Hillgrove, longtime Steelers and Pitt football-basketball radio announcer, and Bill Cardille used to be the announcers for the WPIAL games on Channel 13.
“We’ve been dedicated to bringing local sports to the community for the past five years,” said Rich Cook, general manager of WPNT. “We’ve been airing nine regular season WPIAL football games and this year we started airing six regular season basketball games. We’re really excited on bringing these semifinal games to the public.
“The basketball games we’ve done have been very well received. The schools love it and the ratings aren’t bad. They’re not great, but they’ll grow. We saw that with high school football. We think it’s a really good opportunity to feature these two games.”
South Fayette is the No. 2 seed for the Class 5A tournament and meets an upstart McKeesport team, which is making a semifinal appearance for the first time since 1998, when Swin Cash was the star of the team. In the second game, Mt. Lebanon will be trying to make the Class 6A championship for the third time in four years but must beat No. 1 seed North Hills, which has played for a WPIAL title only once in school history.
When asked if there was any possibility that the station would televise any of the WPIAL championship games from the University of Pittsburgh’s Petersen Events Center, Cook said, “We looked at it. We were able to get these two playoff games, but we weren’t able to make it cost effective to do the championships.”
Mike White: mwhite@post-gazette.com and Twitter @mwhiteburgh
First Published: February 28, 2022, 6:57 p.m.
