PLAYERS PROVE CRITICS
WRONG
T
he Foxes’ football team
surprised just about
everyone but themselves
this season when they
produced the program’s best record
in 15 years, advanced to the WPIAL
Class 5A playoffs, and crushed about
every offensive statistic in recent
school history.
Thei r hard-nosed, aggressive style of
play also got them noticed around the
league and they became known as “the
most physical in the conference,” “one
of the toughest teams we faced all
year,” and as deserving of “better than
a number-eight ranking in the WPIAL
5A playoffs.”
While the team was defeated in the first
round of the WPIAL playoffs, 28-21,
after being paired with the number one
seeded Penn-Trafford High School, they
put up nothing short of a Herculean
fight. Up until the final minutes of the
game, the Foxes led or were tied with
the heavily-favored Penn-Trafford. It
was a tough emotional loss, especially
because this group of seniors was the
first to come full circle with third-year
head coach Tom Loughran and his staff.
The coaching team’s first year was
a bitter disappointment after they
went 1-8 playing one of the toughest
schedules in the WPIAL. Last year’s
move to WPIAL Class 5A was much
better, although the opponents were no
less competitive. This season, the team
finally played like the coaches knew they
could all along. As a result, they were
more confident than ever, stronger,
faster, smarter, and proved capable of
going head-to-head with some of the
best teams in WPIAL 5A. For his role
in the team’s metamorphosis, Coach
Loughran was named by his peers as
the WPIAL 5A Allegheny Nine Coach
of the Year and was also selected as a
Steelers’ Coach of the Week.
Their progress, says senior Jesse
Cohen, a 6’5, 245-pound offensive
and defensive lineman, came partly as
a result of a change in attitude. “We
were just tired of being known as the
school that wasn’t any good, and I think
it helped that we had a chip on our
shoulders. That was very motivating.”
As a part of their tremendous success,
for the first time since 1997, two
players, seniors Nick Gizzo and Micah
Morris, each rushed for more than
1,000 yards in a single season. Micah
has interest from Brown University,
among others, and this season, he
broke his own school rushing record
with 1,322 yards. Nick, the team’s
quarterback, also broke school records
that go back at least 15 years by scoring
18 touchdowns for 108 points. As
a team the Foxes outrushed their
opponents 3,017 yards to 1,305 yards.
But one of the most jaw-dropping
performances that surely beats anything
since the program began in the fall
of 1961, had to be the defense’s
utterly remarkable feat of holding one
opponent to one-yard rushing. “We’ve
had some games over the course of
my time that have been close to that,
but certainly not that dominant,” says
Coach Loughran, who has coached for
35 years.
Also on the strength of the defense,
the Foxes scored another program first
when they defeated Woodland Hills
High School, a perennial powerhouse
that owns a vast collection of WPIAL
and PIAA gold medals.
Junior receiver Cole Waxter said the
senior-heavy team and coaches made
something perfectly clear to the
underclassmen before they cleared the
Penn-Trafford locker room: “They told
us that next year we have to finish what
we weren’t able to do this year, and we
plan on doing that.”
Did you know … in 2017, Niche,
a website that ranks schools and
districts across the state and nation,
ranked Fox Chapel Area #7 out of
73 among the best districts for
athletes in the Pittsburgh area. The
district also ranked #27 out of 470
in Pennsylvania.
Fox Chapel Area | Winter 2017 | icmags.com 23