Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League

A 1990 graduate of North Allegheny, Ray Brinzer emerged as another national wrestling star from Western Pennsylvania while competing for the Tigers. Brinzer won 109 consecutive matches over his final three varsity seasons, and won three straight WPIAL and PIAA gold medals from 1988 to 1990. As a sophomore, he was a key part of the team that won both the WPIAL and PIAA championships and finished with the No. 1 national ranking. That team was inducted into the WPIAL Hall of Fame in 2009, becoming the first wrestling squad to earn the honor. Individually, as a sophomore, Brinzer defeated Ephrata’s Tony Minnich by a 6-2 decision to win state gold at 155, then the next year bumped up to the 160 weight class and topped Waynesburg’s Greg Hopkins, 4-2. In the 1990 PIAA final at 160, he won by an 18-8 major decision against Warwick’s Jeff Martin to become, at the time, the seventh WPIAL wrestler to win three or more PIAA championships. Brinzer also captured three USA Junior National Championships during his high school career, and was the 1990 ASICS Tiger High School Wrestler of the Year and First Team All-American before attending Oklahoma State University. After a season at Oklahoma State, Brinzer transferred to the University of Iowa, where he became a two-time Big Ten champion and NCAA bronze medalist in 1993 and 1995. He was the U.S. national runner-up in Greco-Roman wrestling in 1998 and competed with the national team that year, and in 1999, he finished fourth at the U.S. National Championships in freestyle. Brinzer earned USA Wrestling’s Cadet Greco-Roman Coach of the Year award in 2006, and he ran a successful wrestling club called The Angry Fish, which helped guide the careers of World and Olympic medalists such as Jake Herbert and 2018 WPIAL Hall of Fame inductee Coleman Scott.