PSFCA may be moving to just one East/West All-Star Game

Tagged under: All-Stars, News

Billy Splain | September 17, 2026

Back in 2019 and before that the Pennsylvania Scholastic Football Coaches Association played just one East/West All-Star game. In 2021, (they didn’t play the game in 2020), they moved to two games. The argument was, and we feel it was the correct one, that many great players on smaller teams were getting left out of not one but two prestigious games. The Big 33 and the East/West game. The process of choosing those teams is explained HERE.

At the time it seemed like the proper thing to do, however, a storm was brewing and it grew quickly and tore down the selection process. Several years before the switch to two games Division one college teams had begun “requesting” their recruits to report to campus early. That meant many of the top stars that would normally be chosen for the Big 33 game couldn’t play. So, the PSFCA moved from a traditional summer game to Labor Day. We are sure not because of that move, however, colleges then started pushing for early enrollment.

Why did this affect the East/West games? If you read the above linked article of how teams are chosen you’ll see it’s a trickle down affect. Just two or three years into the 2 game tradition it got very difficult to choose four teams. They were simply running out of nominated players to participate on the big school teams due to the fact that most D1 recruits play for the big school teams.

The Executive Director of the PSFCA, Garry Cathell, explained that “the situation was brought before the board and they held a vote”. While the results haven’t been released, it’s likely that they’ll return to just one game but under a different format.

“It is nice to have the two games. The lower classification really caught fire and was well rostered but we were having trouble with the upper classification, filling those rosters. We are looking too revamp it, we hope to make the number of players larger on each roster. We’d start out with 22 large class and 22 small class players to try to keep a nice balance between all classifications”. The burden would also likely be lifted as far as selecting coaching staffs, practice sites as well as gameday logistics. It takes a lot to organize two all-star games in one day.

You can find all the info for the East West games on the PSFCA Website.