Mount Mat Event Draws Top Grapplers

By: Keith Mills

In the spring of 1975, Mount St. Joseph principal Peter Holland and athletic director John Pleyvak Sr. made a decision that would change the landscape of area high school wrestling forever.

Hal Sparks was coaching baseball, football and wrestling at Mount St. Joe and wanted to concentrate on just baseball and football. Neil Adelberg, who had wrestled for John Lowe at Milford Mill High School, assisted Buck Workman at Catonsville Community College and had just started the program at Cardinal Gibbons when he came to the Irvington school for an interview with Holland and Plevyak.

"Hal had brought in some really good kids but technically they weren't very good," Adelberg said. "I had wrestled under John Lowe and was working with Buck at Catonsville. They were my mentors, and they really taught me a lot. And I had been working a lot of camps with coaches from Oklahoma, Iowa, Ed Peery at Navy, Rich Lorenzo at Penn State, and I was learning a lot about technique and what those guys were teaching. I talked a lot about that and how I thought we could take the program to another level."

Adelberg got the job and not only took the Gaels to that next level -- rewriting the area wrestling record book and setting a standard of excellence that will likely never be equaled -- he began a dynasty that continues more than three decades later.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would last this long," said Adelberg, now president of his own company, Neil Adelberg Asset Advisors. He's also the founder and driving force behind next weekend's Mount Mat Madness, a 30-team invitational tournament now in its fifth year that features some of the finest public and private school high school wrestlers on the East Coast.

"It's one of the top 20 high school tournaments in the country," Adelberg said. "We're starting to see a lot of our kids getting college scholarships, and it's really turned into a major event."

The "Mount" in Mount Mat Madness is, of course, for Mount St. Joe, coached now by Kirk Salvo, who graduated from the school in 1984. Salvo wrestled for former Adelberg assistant Allen Smith, who took over when Adelberg left in 1978 and continued the Gaels’ dominance for the next six years.

John Hefner, Paul Triplett, Brian Murphy, Jay Braunstein and Salvo have coached the state powerhouse since then. Only Murphy is not a Mount St. Joe grad while Hefner, Triplett and Braunstein all wrestled for Adelberg. Triplett is now the school's athletic director.

"They had wrestling at St. Joe for 50 years before I got there," Adelberg said. "They had won a couple of dual meet titles under Hal, but they had never won an MSA championship, much less a national prep championship."

That changed in a hurry.

Adelberg only coached for three years but won three Maryland Scholastic Association championships and three national prep championships. They were dominating teams, winning matches by scores of 60-2 and 55-5.

Four of his wrestlers -- Hefner, Harry Barnabae, Guy Zanti and Keith Dixon -- won national titles and two more, Greg Peery and Louis Chiapparelli, won championships after he left. Eleven of his athletes earned Division I scholarships.

They were young and talented, physical and intense -- and they were unbeatable.

"It took a while to build," Adelberg said, "but I think it's the true definition of a dynasty."

McDonogh, coached now by Pete Welch, replaced Mount St. Joe as MIAA champ the last two years, although the Gaels are still the standard by which other teams are measured. Their history is unparalleled: 56 wrestlers won 89 MSA championships from 1963 to '94 and another 34 have won 60 MIAA titles.

The program began to turn around when Sparks took over as coach in 1971 but really began to hit its stride in the summer of 1975 when Adelberg first met his new team at Ed Peery's wrestling camp at Washington College in Chestertown.

"That's when he told us he would be coaching us," said Barnabae, who lives in the Pasadena section of Anne Arundel County. "We were all loyal to Hal, and we were pretty good, but Neil took us to a different level. The technical drilling he did with us, that was the difference. He told us when he took the job that we needed to improve our technique, and he was right."

A few months later, in February 1976, the Gaels won their first MSA team championship and high school wrestling in the Baltimore area was never the same. Adelberg and even Smith would field more talented teams but the '76 squad was his first, and to this day, maybe the most special.

"The guys on that team are still very close," Barnabae said. "We still see each other as often as possible and still talk to each other three, four times a year. Neil created all of that. It was like a family. He got into it for all the right reasons. He was always there for the kids. It was always about the team and never about an individual's performance. He was, still is, a mentor to me. Over the years, I've talked to Neil about a lot of things: kids, parenting, life in general."

Greg Peery and Chiapparelli arrived in 1977, Rico Chiapparelli in '78 and the Mount St. Joe program was rolling. Peery went on to wrestle at Oklahoma while the Chiapparelli brothers went to Iowa, where they wrestled for Dan Gable. Rico Chiapparelli was a three-time All-American and the 1987 NCAA champ at 177 pounds.

"Jerry [Louis and Rico's dad] really liked what we were doing," Adelberg said.

Jerry Chiapparelli passed away two years after starting the Perry Hall junior wrestling program and triggering the interests of hundreds of area wrestlers in the eastern Baltimore County corridor. There were youngsters like Salvo and Pete Ireland, who both went to Mount St. Joe, and current Overlea athletic director Bruce Malinowski and his two sons. The entire local wrestling community took notice.

"That was really big," Adelberg said. "So was Greg Peery coming here. Ed Peery was one of the most respected coaches in the country. That really legitimized us. After that it just took care of itself. Kids want to go to programs that are winning."

Triplett, Andy Hefner, Ireland, Jordy Binetti and others joined Peery and the Chiapparelli brothers as Adelberg gave way as coach to Smith who gave way to John Hefner in 1985 who gave way to Triplett in 1988. The winning continued.

Now, through the Mount Mat Madness tournament, Adelberg is back on the inside of a sport that is as popular as ever. This year's event will be held Jan. 18-19 at Catonsville Community College. The tournament will feature 400 wrestlers from 29 teams and four states.

Bryn Holmes of McDonogh, Hammond's Vince Taweel and Mike Kessler of Owings Mills are among past local champions while Nicky Gordon of Wyoming Seminary in Pennsylvania will look to join Mark Lewnes and Vince Bohn as the tournament's only three-time winners.

Then there's Lloyd "Butch" Keaser, a 1968 graduate of Brooklyn Park High School who went on to become an All-American at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Keaser is retired from both the Navy and IBM and is now junior varsity wrestling coach at Wilde Lake in Columbia. He will be on hand at the Mount Mat Madness tournament to present some of the awards, 32 years after Adelberg, Ed, Greg and Rex Peery and Zanti drove to Canada to watch the Pumphrey native wrestle in the Olympics.

"In 1976 we rented a Winnebago and drove to Montreal to watch Butch," Adelberg said. "Butch took us everywhere. It was my first introduction into Olympic athletics and it was amazing."

"What Neil's done with this tournament is incredible," Barnabae said. "The buzz among the kids is this is where they want to wrestle and that's the ultimate compliment."

Issue 3.2: January 10, 2008