Spartans display strength at two consecutive tournaments.
photo by Kevin Fleming
The past two weekends have been active ones for the TJ Wrestling Squad, attending two tournaments on consecutive weekends.
With regional, and the state tournament looming larger with each day, the Spartans gear up and attend two prestigious tournaments. First up was the Kennedy Invitational. A traditionally strong tournament had a bit of an off year in terms of competition for the Spartans. TJ easily took first place with the only real challenge coming from Adams City. The Spartans had five, first place finishers in Cody DeLaBarre, Evan Duran, Alec Groditski, Chris Salazar, and Boris Tubic. While the rest of the team finished no lower than third place, there were also four more second place finishers in Leon Baskerville, Thomas Currington, Matt Francis, and Robert McMacken. “They came out and wrestled well today, in a season of ups and downs, this is definitely an up. Next week should be a bit tougher though,” stated Head Coach Mike Laurita.
This past weekend TJ had an early start as they were headed up to the Rumble in the Rockies, hosted by Rifle high school. “Rifle is so far away we had to leave on Friday and stay overnight just so the kids wouldn’t be out of sorts. We knew going in that this tournament would be a lot more difficult than the Kennedy Invitational. With seven teams at this tournament that will be in TJ’s regional tournament this was a good preview of what they will be seeing in just a few weeks.
As a team, the TJ wrestling squad went 4-1 with their only loss to host Rifle and a third place team finish out of 16 schools. The individual placers were DeLaBarre and Salazar, who made it through the tournament with a perfect record and claimed the title for their weight classes.
“Overall I felt we did well, we just need to learn to wrestle at a high level like we did today, all the time. If we do that we will be in good shape,” said Laurita.
