When rumors began swirling about hundreds of thousands of dollars missing from the Western Pennsylvania Youth Football League account in 2025, parents and team representatives began to worry about what might happen to the league’s upcoming season.
A police investigation resulted in the league’s former director being charged in January with two felony counts of theft by unlawful taking, receiving stolen property, misapplying entrusted funds and related misdemeanors.
In the wake of the investigation, teams began leaving the league to strike out on their own, including the eight teams that now form the Western Pennsylvania Football League. Belle Vernon, Connellsville, Baldwin-Whitehall, Hempfield, Montour, Norwin, Trinity and West Allegheny make up the league, which had its first season in 2025.
Another group of Westmoreland County-based youth football programs left to form the Keystone Foothills Football League.
“Our main goal was to ensure the kids could have a season and play football,” said Stush Gorski, president for Norwin Youth Football and co-founder of the WPFL. “All the unknowns at the time pushed us to get together with some other teams that were big enough to field both a varsity and JV team and create the WPFL.”
Where the Western Pennsylvania Youth Football League had an executive director, Gorski and co-founder Dave Ponsonby opted to create a board of directors with a representative from each team.
“Dave and I are at the board meetings, but we would only vote in the event of a tie,” Gorski said. “If something comes up, we take it to the board and the reps from each team make the decision.”
Gorski and Ponsonby also changed the way that gate revenue from league games is distributed. In their previous league, gate fees were collected weekly and divided evenly among all 44 teams in the league. Gorski said it created a situation where larger teams were essentially subsidizing smaller ones.
“You’d have smaller teams and their revenue share was a couple thousand, and then because Norwin is a good bit larger, we were sending in $20,000,” Gorski said. “So we wanted to have a system where teams generating higher amounts of revenue would be able to keep it.”
Instead of collecting weekly gate fees, the WPFL came up with a budget for the year.
“We factored in insurance, trophies for the teams, the website, senior bowl jerseys, everything that goes into the season, and divided that figure equally among all the teams,” Ponsonby said.
Once each team makes its yearly payment, additional revenue stays with them to spend how they see fit.
“We set it up as more of a membership base than a profit-sharing base,” Ponsonby said. “One of our goals was not to have large amounts of money moving through the organization. We do our budget, the teams pay in and if there’s money left at the end of the season, that’s what gets divided equally among the teams.”
Currently the league has eight teams.
“Ideally we’d like to get it to 10,” Gorski said. “And big-picture-wise, we’d love to eventually get together with all the teams in the area and have a league that’s divided by size.”
The next step in preparing for the upcoming season is finalizing the WPFL schedule. Players will begin practice in July, and opening day will be Aug. 16.
“The whole goal was that no one person would be making a lot of the decisions,” Ponsonby said. “We have a great board, and we have a treasurer. We really wanted to give this back to the teams to run.”
For more on the league, see WesternPAFL.com.
The Western Pennsylvania Youth Football League’s former director, William E. Spencer, 57, of Washington, has a formal arraignment scheduled for April 28 in the Washington County Court of Common Pleas.