Wyomissing gains early victory against an old foe: The PIAA (updated)
2026 Berks football coverage presented by
Utilities Employees Credit Union
(Story corrected to show Wyomissing lost to Twin Valley in 2025 regular season, not the postseason.)
The Wyomissing Spartans earned their first football victory of 2026 months before the season kicks off.
School officials was given notice recently that the football team will return to the Class 3A level for the next two seasons after playing a level higher for the past two years.
The school was notified in a letter from the PIAA after a review determined that the football team played with four transfers the past two seasons. Had it played with five, it would have exceeded the PIAA’s Success Formula threshold and remained at 4A for two more seasons.
“We felt we had a right to stay at 3A,” said athletic director Frank Ferrandino, an assistant coach on the team. “That’s where we belong.”
Wyomissing was initially notified that it would stay at 4A for the 2026 and 2027 seasons because the PIAA identified more than 30 new names on its roster, signaling they were potential transfers. Most were student-athletes who came into the program from junior high; only four previously attended other schools.
The change means that the Spartans will be better able compete for district championships. They were eliminated in 2024 by Lampeter-Strasburg in the District 3 Class 4A title game. Their only regular season loss in 2025 came against Twin Valley, the eventual 4A district champ. Each of those teams took an unbeaten record into their respective PIAA championship game.
Before being pushed up one classification by the Competition Formula Wyomissing dominated District 3 football at the Class 3A level.
The Spartans won five straight championships from 2019-23, and some of them weren’t even close: They beat West Perry 42-14 and 63-7 and Boiling Springs 55-13.
Had Wyomissing remained in 3A there’s little doubt it would have clicked off championships the past two seasons.
Class 4A proved to be a stepper hill to climb.
Wyomissing came close to a sixth straight championship in 2024; it took L-S to overtime in the title game.
This season the Spartans were eliminated in the semifinals, giving up a touchdown to Susquehanna Township on the last play of the game.
Those playoff losses meant Wyomissing didn’t earn enough playoff points to remain at 4A; the determining issue was its number of transfers.
Under long-time coach Bob Wolfrum Wyomissing has often played larger schools during the regular season, but beating teams with considerably larger rosters in the postseason can become difficult.
“When you get into playoffs, it’s week after week after week of playing bigger schools,” Ferrandino said, “and that got physically tough on our kids.”
Ferrandino said the return to Class 3A won’t require any changes; the team’s schedule for the next two seasons has been finalized. It will remain in Section 4 of the Lancaster-Lebanon League and play non-league games against Southern Columbia, Frankford, and Twin Valley, which is moving to Section 3 for the next two seasons.
This has been an ongoing issue for Wyomissing. In 2022 it appealed the PIAA’s initial decision to move up a class and won, allowing it to remain at the 3A level. In 2024 its appeal to remain in 3A was denied.
The Competition Formula was put in place in 2018 in an attempt to slow the widespread recruiting that had rankled so many public school coaches and officials for years. It was an attempt to slow the flow of highly talented athletes to top football and basketball programs.
The PIAA’s definition of a transfer is simply a student-athlete who moves from one school to another, regardless of reason or intent. It doesn’t consider perceived intent, playing time, or value to the team in regard to transfers.
As former PIAA executive director Dr. Robert Lombardi often said: “A transfer is a transfer.”
Any time a name that wasn’t on a team’s roster the year before shows up the PIAA flags it as a transfer. The onus is on the school to convince the PIAA that the new name was not an actual transfer.
The PIAA grants exceptions to “unusual circumstances beyond the reasonable control of the student or the student’s family,” things such as financial hardship, or a move necessitated by a parent’s job or military service.
As for appeals, they are “are limited to a mathematical error in the assignment of Success Points or asserted errors in the assignment of the number of transfers,” according to a statement released after Wyomissing’s unsuccessful appear in 2024.
The PIAA has tweaked the Competition Formula several times since its inception, attempting to make it less restrictive. Last year it increased the number of success points (for football) from six to seven and the number of transfers (for football) from three to five.
