St. Joe’s wrestling produces two medal winners at state championships for first time

Mike Carbone thinks back to when he spearheaded the resurrection of the Saint Joseph High School wrestling program seven years ago. While interviewing to become the head coach, he had one non-negotiable request: The Falcons needed to have their own room to train in.

Sustained success at a school that didn’t have a wrestling team in 26 years would require resources and commitment. And when success eventually came, he wanted his wrestlers to have a home where they could look up and see their names etched on banners forever.

That process reached a historic moment on March 8 at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City when St. Joe’s juniors Tyler Whitford and Morgan Schwarz took fifth and sixth place in their respective weight classes, giving the school two medal winners at the state championships for the first time in history.

“Getting Tyler and Morgan on the podium at the same time was a really big accomplishment for us,” Carbone said.

In the early days of wrestling at St. Joe’s, the only Falcon to medal was Craig Belunes with a third-place finish in 1977. Under Carbone’s leadership, Nico Calello took third in 2021 and then Gio Alejandro was a runner-up in 2023.

To now have multiple wrestlers reaching an elite status speaks to not only their hard work, but the program’s growth where more and more kids want to train at a top high school facility under Carbone and his well-respected staff.

“Our room is definitely one of the top rooms in the state, just how it looks and the size of it,” Carbone said. “St. Joe’s really did a good job with their architectural planning of that room and how they made it kind of its own separate entity. It came out really, really nice.”

Carbone’s assistants are Joe Liquori, who worked with him for six years at Woodbridge High, and former Woodbridge wrestlers Allan Jordan and Bryan McLaughlin, who both wrestled in college, as well as other volunteers with wrestling experience.

“The kids like it because they’re close to their age,” Carbone said. “They can get close to them and they feel good about rolling around with these types of guys because they trust them. They’ve seen recent success at the D1, D2 and D3 (college) levels.”

Building trust is crucial to get kids to wrestle as hard as they can for you, Carbone notes, and that’s exactly what Whitford and Schwarz did on their unique journeys to Atlantic City.

Whitford moved up one weight class from 157 pounds as a sophomore to 165 this season. He is known as a blue-collar fighter who really uses his hands to play great defense by turning his opponent’s offense into his own offense, which makes it difficult to score points on him.

Whitford won his fifth-place match in the state championships on a 4-1 decision.

“Tyler is going to wear you down,” Carbone said. “If you saw Tyler’s face at the end of Atlantic City, he had cuts all over his face. He had a bruise underneath his eye, the back of his neck had claw marks from people hand fighting with him, because he embraces that. He loves the physicality.”

Schwarz, on the other hand, took a more significant jump in weight classes over the last two years from 126 to 157, partly because he grew exponentially taller by the end of his freshman year.

But Schwarz is a different type of wrestler than Whitford, using flashy creativity to create offense as he sees it.

“Morgan’s technique is very good,” Carbone said. “He’s constantly moving, constantly using misdirection, and his leverage points are always very, very good.”

Wrestlers come to St. Joe’s with their own styles that they have developed over time. The coaches evaluate the areas where they are strong and where they need work in order to evolve.

Whitford and Schwarz both struggled on bottom as freshmen, so Carbone’s staff addressed that in the offseason to help them ascend toward their potential.

“We do like to have a system, but some guys are going to pick up different parts of the system than others,” Carbone said. “Morgan likes a lot of what we do with our setups and attacks to the legs, where Tyler is going to like a lot more of what we do out of front headlocks. And both those things fit into the system. It’s just what guy is gonna excel in one spot versus another. So they both are great wrestlers, and they’re doing great things.”

As for the entire program, Carbone says he attracts talented wrestlers through word of mouth –  not his own recruiting, which would be too time-consuming – because kids are hearing positive feedback on what is transpiring at the school.

St. Joe’s has won its division five years in a row, the Greater Middlesex County Tournament three years in a row, and its district tournament four years in a row.

Perhaps the best is yet to come, especially with a new weight room at the school coming soon. Carbone led the charge for that by discussing ways to fundraise it, but they are still waiting on permits from Metuchen.

“That is going to be a very nice facility once we get everything moving here.” Carbone said. “A weight room is great for all athletes, not just some. So I definitely think that that’s a spot where we’re gonna be solid. I think it’s gonna bring so much to the school, value-wise.”