Wrestling squad proves their worth against West, GW and South.
by Vince Crespin
photo by Kevin Fleming
After a successful campaign at the Survivor Series Tournament, the wrestling team returned to TJ against Fairview High School Thursday night and lost 39-33.
After staring the night off with a forfeit victory in the heavyweight division, the TJ wrestlers struggled early losing seven of nine matches. Even though the team lost three matches by points alone, and all of them in the final five seconds of each match, the team did wrestle hard to rally against the early, substantial Fairview lead.
“You never want to see your kids lose like that in the final seconds of an important match. When that happens it’s either heart or conditioning; you can’t correct heart,” said Head Coach Mike Laurita.
In a match that Coach Laurita felt they should have won, he was disappointed in the team loss. “It was frustrating. I really felt like we were a better team than we showed tonight,” commented Laurita.
However, there were other factors that contributed to the close loss, as well. Sophomore Robert McMackin, the varsity 152 lb. wrestler was overweight by .2 pounds, thus forcing TJ to forfeit that weight class, giving up a valuable six points. “It was a stupid mistake that a young kid will make. If he learns from it then good, if he doesn’t then we are in trouble,” said Laurita.
But the Spartans they didn’t have to wait a whole week, as per the usual, to get the bad taste out of their mouths. The had a league meet on Friday, which West, GW and South all attended. “It was a good gauge of what the DPL will look like this year. All I know is that we need to get our heads right. The lighter weights need to perform better than they have, and if we wrestle the way we did on Thursday in February, we will be in a world of trouble,” said Laurita.
Fortunately for Laurita’s blood pressure things went much better the following day. With a dominating first place win in which TJ scored a resounding 120 points, they breezed through the league opener with the second place team, West, only scoring 44 points. It was a good night for the individuals as well. With 12 first place finishers for the match, the night’s big winners were: Joey Scarlett, Guillermo Estrada, Peter Taylor, Even Duran, Matt Francis, Leon Baskerville, Justin Hoffman, Cody DeLaBarre, Chris Salazar, Tra Holcomb, Boris Tubic and Anthony Choy.
While happy with the overall results, Laurita still thinks the team can use improvement. “I can’t be too picky because the varsity went 26-2. We got better and that’s the key. We still need to improve on a lot of technical stuff. We are getting better slowly; it would be nice if they got it done quicker.”
