By Matt Chandik
As far as head coaching debuts go, Matt Lindeman’s rookie campaign as the Penn Wood boss a season ago couldn’t have gone much better.
Sure, the Patriots could have won the state championship, but consider this. Penn Wood posted an 18-9 campaign, a stark improvement over a 12-11 season in 2015-16, and reached the state tournament for the first time since 2011 before falling to Williamsport. In 2011, the Patriots reached the Class AAAA semifinals before bowing out to Mount Lebanon in overtime.
Lindeman’s first year also produced a Del Val championship with a 9-1 league mark, and a big part of that was a heavy reliance on a group of eight or nine seniors who’d been through it all before.
So, because of that, Lindeman and the Patriots will have to try to produce an encore with a blank slate.