Franklin Regional had a 13-point lead with three bouts remaining against Connellsville in the WPIAL Class 3A team wrestling championship.

All the Panthers needed to do was win one match and they would clinch their first title in a decade.

Two Falcons major decisions later, however, Franklin Regional had given back 10 points to Connellsville and was on the verge of one of the bigger collapses in recent history. All the Panthers needed, though, was to not lose by anything other than a standard decision and the title was theirs.

Ethan Cartwright made sure criteria never came into play.

In the final bout of the day, the sophomore came out and took immediate control against Connellsville’s Kolton Turek and swept to a 9-0 major decision to close out a 33-25 victory for the Panthers in the championship match against the defending champion Falcons at Peters Township.

“All my teammates and all my coaches were just saying to stay composed. It’s a sport. Have fun,” Cartwright said. “I just wanted to get that first takedown. They say if you get the first takedown, you usually win the match.”

Cartwright may have capped off the victory, but it was a surprising win much earlier that turned the tide in Franklin Regional’s favor. Freshman Beau Fennick had lost two earlier meetings against Connellsville’s Tommy Gretz, including an 8-0 win at the NursePro Tournament on Dec. 21, but he came back with a 6-4 victory that gave the Panthers three critical points and, at the time, an early 12-3 lead.

“It meant everything. Beau Fennick is a freshman this year, but he’s been good for a while,” Franklin Regional coach Matt Lebe said. “He works out three times a day. He wants to be good and this is a moment, we believe, will propel him to a very strong career.”

Franklin Regional had to both hold onto a lead and make a comeback to win its title. The Panthers were down 24-0 to Thomas Jefferson in the semifinals earlier in the day, but came back for a 37-36 win. 

“It was a good win,” Cartwright said. “We knew that it was going to be like that. I knew from how that ended, we were going to be ready.”

Class 2A

Burrell senior Luke Boylan felt a couple of butterflies floating around before he took the mat against Derry’s Chase Lukon.

“Yeah, I was a little nervous,” Boylan said. “But the nerves turned to excitement and I was just ready to get after it.”

He did just that.

Boylan pinned Lukon at 3:00 in the 215-pound bout, then Ayden Kun put a bow on the match with a pin of the Trojans Levi Haase at 3:27 to propel Burrell to a 33-27 victory against Derry to give the Bucs their second consecutive WPIAL Class 2A title and 19th in school history.

“We’re back,” Burrell first-year coach Steve Ansani said. “We lost two in a row (in 2022 and 2023) and then we came back. Winning two in a row means we’re one of the premiere programs in Double-A in the WPIAL.”

Burrell had won a WPIAL-record 15 consecutive titles from 2007-21 before Quaker Valley pulled off the upset, 30-28, in 2022. The Bucs then finished as the runner-up to Burgettstown in 2023 before rebounding with a 41-20 win against Burgettstown in the final last season.

This is the 23rd consecutive year Burrell has appeared in the WPIAL team final. The Bucs are 18-5 in the finals in that time, but the current squad still remembers those back-to-back losses in 2022-23.

“It means a lot, especially falling short my freshman and sophomore years,” Boylan said. “I’m excited.”

Derry, which had not been in the finals since losing to Burrell in 2018 fell to 0-3 all-time in the championship match. What hurt the Trojans most was that the margin of defeat came as a result of a forfeit at 172.

“We had a hole there the whole year and we knew our guys had to cover it,” Derry coach Troy Dolan said. “You’d like to have someone there, but we knew going in that was the case and we didn’t deliver when we needed to.”

Prior to the forfeit, Derry had just taken an 8-7 lead thanks to an 8-1 victory from Ewan Olson at 160. After the forfeit put Burrell ahead 13-8, Brady Brown won a 1-0 decision at 189 that closed the Bucs lead to only 13-11.

But the back-to-back pins from Boylan and Kun put the match out of reach.

First Published: February 1, 2025, 10:32 p.m.