(File Photo of Rochester Area School District Sign)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Rochester, PA) After its virtual school board meeting yesterday, the Rochester High School board approved three new coaches to lead three of its sports programs. Brian Burton will be the next head football coach, Michael Patsch will be the next baseball head coach and Cassandra Colon-Maldonado be the next girls volleyball head coach for Rochester High School.
(File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – The nation office of the NCAA is shown in Indianapolis on March 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) A man named Shane Hennen, formerly of Pittsburgh, is accused of being the ringleader of a large point shaving scheme that has turned the world of college basketball upside down. An indictment was revealed in Philadelphia on January 15th, 2026 and it involved betting on NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association Games and rigging them. This investigation has implicated twenty-sixpeople whichincludes over a dozen college basketball players who allegedly tried to fix games. Shane Hennen was a pool-hustler, a gambling fixer who was petty and a suspected drug dealer in the Steel City. Hennen got into a tussle outside a nightclub in the South Side of Pittsburgh in 2009 with a former Duquesne Dukes basketball player, who accused him of cheating on a gambling debt. Hennen then pled guilty to aggravated assault and was sentenced to 18 to 36 months in prison. According to federal prosecutors, he moved to Philadelphia, where in 2022, he was accused of hatching the point shaving scheme with two other people. The trio are accused of fixing games in the Chinese Basketball Association, where they celebrated their early success before it spread to the NCAA games.
(File Photo: Source for Photo: Arthur Smith, offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers, is pictured before a preseason NFL football game against the Houston Texans, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/ Gene J. Puskar, File)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) A source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter on Saturday that Ohio State University is finalizing
(File Photo: Source for Photo: Pittsburgh Penguins’ Benjamin Kindel celebrates after his goal against the Vancouver Canucks during second-period NHL hockey game action in Vancouver, British Columbia, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Rookie Ben Kindel scored twice in the second period to lead the Penguins to a 3-2 win over the Vancouver Canucks on Sunday and a sweep of Pittsburgh’s four-game western Canada trip.
Kindel, from nearby Coquitlam, British Columbia, had a large contingent of supporters on hand for his second multi-goal game. The 18-year-old had gone 20 games without a goal after scoring eight in his first 28 and has 10 goals and 12 assists in 48 games.
Evgeni Malkin also scored for the Penguins (26-14-11), and Stuart Skinner stopped 19 shots and won for the seventh time in eight games.
Jake DeBrusk and Teddy Blueger scored in the third period for the Canucks (17-30-5), who failed to complete their comeback try and dropped their second straight. Kevin Lankinen stopped 21 shots.
Malkin and Kindel made it 2-0 with goals 3:17 apart in the second period. Malkin opened the scoring by taking a pass from Thomas Novak that went over a Canuck defender’s stick, then beat Lankinen. Kindel made it a two-goal lead by directing in a shot from defenseman Ryan Shea. Kindel gave Pittsburgh a 3-0 lead at 17:22 by beating Lankinen on a shot from the faceoff circle.
Pittsburgh opened its trip with a 6-3 win over Seattle on Monday, beat Calgary 4-1 on Wednesday, then defeated Edmonton 6-2 on Thursday.
Veteran Kris Letang returned to the Pittsburgh lineup after missing two games with an upper-body injury.
The Canucks have just one win in their last 14 games (1-11-2). Canucks goaltender Thatcher Demko missed his eighth game with a lower-body injury.
Penguins: Host the Chicago Blackhawks on Thursday.
Canucks: Host the San Jose Sharks on Tuesday in the sixth game of an eight-game homestand.
(File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – Former Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy waves during halftime of an NFL football game against the Detroit Lions Sunday, Sept. 7, 2025, in Green Bay, Wis. (AP Photo/Matt Ludtke, File)
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Mike McCarthy is coming home.
The Pittsburgh Steelers announced Saturday the club has reached a verbal agreement with McCarthy to replace Mike Tomlin as head coach.
McCarthy grew up in the Greenfield neighborhood, just a couple of miles away from the team’s practice facility on the city’s South Side.
The 62-year-old McCarthy is 185–123–2 (playoffs included) across 18 seasons, 13 with Green Bay — which beat the Steelers in the Super Bowl following the 2010 season — and five with Dallas.
His potential hire is just the fourth by the Steelers since 1969 and a marked departure from his predecessors, Tomlin and Hall of Famers Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher.
All three were largely unknown assistants/coordinators. McCarthy is hardly that.
McCarthy would replace Tomlin, who stepped down earlier this month after his 19th season ended with a seventh straight playoff loss, this one at home to the Houston Texans. Tomlin’s surprise departure came as he was under contract for 2026 with a club option for 2027.
The Steelers took a methodical approach, interviewing nearly a dozen candidates that spanned a wide spectrum of experience, from Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores (who spent 2022 as a defensive assistant on Tomlin’s staff) to Chargers defensive coordinator Jesse Minter, who was hired by the Baltimore Ravens on Thursday to replace John Harbaugh.
They ultimately landed on McCarthy, who takes over a team that has been stuck in a purgatory of sorts for going on a decade.
Tomlin’s nearly two-decade tenure included 193 regular-season victories — tied with Noll for the most in franchise history — and the team’s sixth Super Bowl. Perhaps most remarkably, Pittsburgh didn’t have a losing season with Tomlin on the sideline.
That startling consistency, however, did not always translate to postseason success. Pittsburgh has been one-and-done in each of its last six playoff appearances, all of them double-digit losses.
In some ways, the Steelers have been victims of their own success. They have frequently been drafting in the high teens and low-20s, not exactly a prime position to find a franchise quarterback. It didn’t help that they chose not to draft Ben Roethlisberger’s replacement in his final seasons, then whiffed badly on Kenny Pickett, who flamed out in less than two years after being taken in the first round of the 2022 draft.
It’s led to a revolving door at the most important position on the field. If Aaron Rodgers, who will be a free agent in March, doesn’t return for a 22nd season, the Steelers will have their sixth different Week 1 quarterback in six years. McCarthy’s arrival, however, would seemingly open the door for the 42-year-old Rodgers to come back.
Rodgers said earlier this month he believes he would have at least a couple of options if he chose to run it back one more time, and his long partnership with McCarthy in Green Bay included a Super Bowl victory over Tomlin and the Steelers. Pittsburgh will have the 21st pick when a draft that appears to be thin in quality options at quarterback descends on the Steel City in late April.
There’s a very real chance the Steelers, who currently only have veteran backup Mason Rudolph and 2025 sixth-round pick Will Howard under contract for next season, will kick the can down the road again and address a handful of other positions of need in the draft, namely wide receiver and cornerback.
Regardless, president Art Rooney II brushed off the idea of the Steelers rebuilding.
“I don’t like that word that much,” Rooney said the day after Tomlin resigned. “We’ll try to compete day one if we can.”
McCarthy’s potential arrival would indicate that’s still the plan.
His hire would also give McCarthy a chance to burnish a resume that stalled a bit after guiding the Packers from a wild-card berth to the franchise’s fifth Super Bowl in 2010.
McCarthy is just 6-9 in the playoffs since the confetti fell at AT&T Stadium. That includes a 1-2 mark with the Cowboys, where he posted three straight 12-win seasons from 2021-23 before being fired after Dallas tumbled to 7-10 in 2024 thanks in large part to an injury to quarterback Dak Prescott that limited him to just eight games.
The one thing McCarthy — who early in his career was a graduate assistant at the University of Pittsburgh (which now shares a building with the Steelers) — has consistently done is put together offenses that can move the ball.
McCarthy-coached teams have finished in the top 10 in yards in 12 of his 18 seasons, though his first years in both Green Bay in 2006 and Dallas in 2020 were sluggish.
The Steelers have been stuck in a transition period on offense for a solid half-decade. That transition may soon move to an expensive and aging defense that has potential Hall of Famers at every level (defensive tackle Cam Heyward, linebacker T.J. Watt and defensive back Jalen Ramsey), all in their 30s.
McCarthy would be the first Steelers hire with previous NFL head coaching experience since Mike Nixon in 1965. Nixon lasted just one season in Pittsburgh and was fired after going 2-12. Nixon was replaced by Bill Austin, who made it three years before Pittsburgh hired Noll, a decision that transformed the franchise from a laughingstock into one of the league’s most successful and stable teams.
Noll and his four Super Bowls set a standard of excellence that Cowher and Tomlin maintained in their own unique ways.
That standard, however, had slipped of late. McCarthy’s mandate will be returning some of the luster to a team that hasn’t won a playoff game since the final days of the Barack Obama administration.
It will also provide a test of sorts for the hometown boy who made good, who now gets to find out whether you can truly go home again.
(File Photo: Source for Photo: Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy walks on the field following an NFL football game against the Washington Commanders, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025 in Arlington, Texas. The Commanders won 23-19. (AP Photo/Gareth Patterson)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) Sources are telling ESPN’s Adam Schefter that the Pittsburgh Steelers are planning to hire Pittsburgh native Mike McCarthy as their next head coach. McCarthy will succeed Mike Tomlin, who stepped down as the head coach of the Steelers on January 13th, 2026 after nineteen seasons with the team. McCarthy, a native of Greenfield, was the head coach for the Green Bay Packers when Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers played for the Packers when they won Super Bowl 45 against the Steelers on February 6th, 2011 in Arlington, Texas. McCarthy was the head coach of the Packers from 2006-2018, and then after a hiatus in 2019, he was hired by the Cowboys and coached them from 2020-2024. The sixty-two-year-old McCarthy worked with Steelers general manager Omar Khan in New Orleans in 2000 but he did not coach in the NFL this season. McCarthy will become only the fourth head coach the Steelers have hired since 1969, following in the footsteps of Pro Football Hall of Famers Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher, as well as the aforementioned Mike Tomlin.
(File Photo of the WPIAL Logo)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) Five WPIAL quarterbacks have now been nominated as finalists for this year’s Willie Thrower Award, which is given each year to the top high school football quarterback from western Pennsylvania. The five nominees were announced Wednesday and they were selected by a panel of seventy people made up of coaches, media members, and field officials. They were Carson Bellinger of Avonworth, Joey Felitsky of North Catholic, Nolan DiLucia of Peters Township, Aaron Strader of Pine-Richland and Ethan Hellman of Upper St. Clair. The winner of the award named after Willie Thrower, the first Black quarterback to appear in an NFL game for the Chicago Bears in the 1950s, will be announced on March 28th, 2026.
(File Photo: Source for Photo: Pittsburgh Penguins’ Justin Brazeau (16), Anthony Mantha (39) and Brett Kulak (77) celebrate after a goal against the Edmonton Oilers during first-period NHL hockey game action in Edmonton, Alberta, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press via AP)
EDMONTON, Alberta (AP) — Anthony Mantha scored twice, Sidney Crosby made it three in an early 37-second span and the Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Edmonton Oilers 6-2 on Thursday night.
The 37-second spree was the fastest three goals in Penguins history and the fastest three allowed by the Oilers.
The Penguins scored on three of their first four shots. Just 2:20 in, Justin Brazeau made a nifty pass through a defender’s legs to Mantha, who deflected it in. Twenty-two seconds later, Mantha scored on a breakaway. Crosby struck 15 seconds after that, deflecting a pass from the slot into the net.
Evgeni Malkin had a goal and an assist, Rickard Rakell, and Egor Chinakhov also scored and Arturs Silovs made 30 saves. The Penguins have won three straight and are 10-2-2 in their last 14 to get to 25-14-11.
Jake Walman and Matthew Savoie scored for Edmonton, and Tristan Jarry made 16 saves against his former team. The Oilers have lost two in a row and four of six to fall to 25-19-8.
Connor McDavid was held pointless in consecutive games are the first time this season. The last time he went two games without a point was Feb. 7 and Feb. 22, 2025, a pair of matches broken up by the 4 Nations Face-Off.
Penguins: At Vancouver on Sunday.
Oilers: Host Washington on Saturday night.
(File Photo: Source for Photo: Pittsburgh Penguins goalie Stuart Skinner, left, makes a save against Calgary Flames’ Adam Klapka during the second period of an NHL hockey game in Calgary, Alberta, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. (Larry MacDougal/The Canadian Press via AP)
CALGARY, Alberta (AP) — Tommy Novak and Evgeni Malkin each had a goal and an assist as the Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Calgary Flames 4-1 on Wednesday night.
Yegor Chinakhov and Bryan Rust also scored for Pittsburgh (24-14-11). The Penguins have points in five straight games (3-0-2) and are 9-2-2 in their last 13 games. Stuart Skinner made 18 saves in his sixth win in seven starts and improved to 17-12-4. Skinner is 6-2-1 against the Flames in his career.
Penguins captain Sidney Crosby had an assist and extended his point streak to four games (two goals, five assists).
Yegor Sharangovich scored for Calgary (21-24-5). Dustin Wolf had 21 stops in losing for the sixth time in seven games. He fell to 15-20-2.
The Flames have been limited to two goals in two games since Sunday’s trade that sent defenseman Rasmus Andersson to the Vegas Golden Knights. At the time, Andersson was third on the team in scoring.
Malkin’s 11th goal at 7:49 of the first period gave the Penguins a lead they never squandered.
Calgary got on the scoreboard with three seconds left in the second period when Zach Whitecloud’s point shot deflected in off the pants of Sharangovich. Pittsburgh restored its two-goal advantage 50 seconds into the third period when Rust scored on a wraparound.
Penguins defenseman Kris Letang (upper body) missed his first game of the season. Jack St. Ivany took his spot and had a pair of assists as Pittsburgh avenged its 2-1 home-ice loss to the Flames 11 days ago.
The Flames’ Martin Pospisil made his season debut after being sidelined with a concussion. The 26-year-old Slovak was recalled Tuesday from the AHL after a two-game conditioning stint. With Jonathan Huberdeau (lower body) a scratch, Pospisil took his spot on the left side of Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee.
Penguins: Visit Edmonton on Thursday.
Flames: Host Washington on Friday.
(Credit for Photo: Courtesy of the Associated Press: Caption for Photo: Colorado Avalanche defenseman Ilya Solovyov skates against the Columbus Blue Jackets during an NHL hockey game in Columbus, Ohio, Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025. The Avalanche won 4-1.)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) Pittsburgh Penguins President of Hockey Operations and General Manager Kyle Dubas announced yesterday that the Penguins have acquired defenseman Ilya Solovyov from the Colorado Avalanche in exchange for Valtteri Puustinen and a 2026 seventh-round draft pick. The twenty-five-year-old Solovyov has split the season between the Avalanche and their American Hockey League affiliate, the Colorado Eagles. Solovyov has one goal, two assists and three points in sixteen games with the Avalanche and he is now signed through the 2025-26 season. This carries an average annual value of $775,000 and he has played in three games with the Eagles this season. Solovyov was originally drafted in the seventh round of the 2020 NHL Draft at 205th overall by the Calgary Flames.