Jonathan Bombulie stories, Page 10

Pitt-Johnstown’s wrestling team lost out on a legitimate chance at a team title when the NCAA Division II national championships were canceled due to coronavirus. Three of its top wrestlers, all WPIAL graduates, received some consolation Thursday in the form of a postseason award. Brendan Howard, Jacob Ealy and Chris...

Gerrit Nijenhuis is a dynamic performer and two-time state champion who added another sparkling chapter to Canon-McMillan’s storied wrestling history this season, so it probably is not fair to boil down his high school career to just one number. Then again, it’s a really impressive number. Nijenhuis’ 6-0 victory over...

As an assistant coach with Burrell football the last two seasons, Randy Walters watched the Bucs fling the ball all over the field using head coach Shawn Liotta’s up-tempo Air Raid approach. It’s the kind of offense that can stir football passions in a coach, especially an old quarterback, and...

Pittsburgh Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford has some of the same thoughts many Western Pennsylvanians do as the coronavirus pandemic has kept people holed up in their homes for extended periods of time. Not macaroni and cheese again. Rutherford spoke with reporters on a conference call Wednesday afternoon shortly after...

By any measure, Iowa’s Spencer Lee has been one of the most dominant athletes in college wrestling this season. On Tuesday, the NCAA made it official. Lee, a Franklin Regional graduate, was named winner of the Most Dominant Wrestler award for Division I. Lee went 18-0 in matches against Division...

If the suspended PIAA basketball playoffs resume, the season won’t end after all the hardware is handed out in Hershey. A Western Pennsylvania all-star tradition will follow. The Roundball Classic is set for April 24-25 at Geneva College with senior all-stars from the WPIAL, City League and District 10 facing...

Given the depth of talent on the court at any given time, it’s hard for any individual player to stand out on the Chartiers Valley girls basketball roster. Sophomore Aislin Malcolm has managed to shine through. The 5-foot-10 guard was named Pennsylvania player of the year by MaxPreps on Tuesday....

The Penn State hockey team will never know how the most promising season in program history would have turned out on the ice. The Big Ten and NCAA tournaments have, of course, been canceled. On paper, though, the Nittany Lions finished as the eighth-best team in the country. Penn State...

Gerrit Nijenhuis is a dynamic performer and two-time state champion who added another sparkling chapter to Canon-McMillan’s storied wrestling history this season, so it probably is not fair to boil down his high school career to just one number. Then again, it’s a really impressive number. Nijenhuis’ 6-0 victory over...

Pete Babando, who was born in the Braeburn section of Lower Burrell and scored one of the most dramatic goals in NHL history, died Wednesday at the age of 94. Babando wrote his name in the history books April 23, 1950 while playing for the Detroit Red Wings against the...

On Feb. 22, 1980, Team USA pulled off perhaps the greatest upset in sports history, knocking off the vaunted Soviet national team at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y. Even as players climbed atop the podium to receive their gold medals after completing the mission with a win over...

On the most basic level, Penn State’s football team is about to embark on a pretty standard bowl trip to Dallas to take on Memphis in the Cotton Bowl a week from Saturday. The itinerary will include sponsored functions, luncheons, scripted sightseeing tours — that sort of thing. The goal...

Extended an inviation to a high-profile bowl with a storied history, it probably wouldn’t have been polite for Penn State coach James Franklin to grouse about being passed over by the Rose Bowl on Sunday. So he didn’t. Franklin put on a perfectly happy face while discussing No. 10 Penn...

Claiming a Class 5A title in WPIAL football will be that much more difficult next season, according to enrollment numbers released by the PIAA Thursday. Pine-Richland, a Class 6A finalist this season, will drop to 5A for the new two-year cycle that begins in the fall. The Rams will now...

Moments after the last time his team faced Ohio State, Penn State coach James Franklin uttered a few phrases that have continued to resonate. “The reality is, we’ve gone from an average football team, to a good football team, to a great football team, but we’re not an elite team...

Two years ago, it would have been fairly easy to predict sophomore quarterback Justin Fields would play a key role in the outcome of Saturday’s marquee matchup between No. 2 Ohio State and No. 8 Penn State. It would have been much harder to forecast Fields would be wearing scarlet...

The Pittsburgh Penguins acquired forward Graham Knott in exchange for forward Joseph Cramarossa in a minor-league trade with the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday. Knott, 22, was assigned to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton. A second-round pick in the 2015 draft, he hasn’t panned out in three pro seasons. This year, he’s been with the...

When news first broke earlier this month that Ohio State’s Chase Young faced a suspension for taking a loan from a family friend in violation of NCAA rules, there was a bit of conjecture about how long the punishment would last. Judging by his comments this week, Penn State coach...

Big-play receiver KJ Hamler’s status for No. 9 Penn State’s matchup with No. 2 Ohio State on Saturday remains up in the air. Hamler is Penn State’s leading receiver with 46 catches for 791 yards and eight touchdowns this season. He scored on a 93-yard TD pass in a 27-26...

Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford said Tuesday morning that he received death threats via social media after the Nittany Lions suffered their first loss of the season to Minnesota on Nov. 9. Clifford said he deleted his social media after the 31-26 loss. “It’s kind of sad to say, but...

At the start of the 2016-17 NHL season, Pittsburgh Penguins general manager Jim Rutherford was told teams couldn’t win back-to-back Stanley Cup championships in the salary cap era. When the Carolina Hurricanes were founded in 1997, Rutherford was told there was no way a team could succeed in a hockey...

If being able to score a big goal in a big game is the mark of a clutch soccer player, what does that make Mars’ Taylor Hamlett? She always scores more than one. Hamlett scored multiple goals for the fourth consecutive playoff game, netting a hat trick to help Mars...

It’s a generally accepted principle in hockey circles that it’s unfortunate at best and anticlimactic at worst when an important game is decided by a shootout. The women’s gold medal game in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea might be the exception to that rule. Jocelyne Lamoureax-Davidson’s jaw-dropping triple move...

Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson and Maddie Rooney supplied the shootout heroics that gave the United States the gold medal in women’s hockey in the 2018 Olympics. You might bump into them in the toiletries aisle at Target tomorrow morning. Marie-Philip Poulin and Melodie Daoust are the faces of women’s hockey in Canada...

As a fifth-year senior, a relative graybeard in the Penn State locker room at age 23, Kittanning native Nick Bowers knows the recent history of the rivalry between his team and Michigan State. They’re the opponent that gets its hands on a Nittany Lions team ranked in the top 10...