West Greene’s Morris guts it out
When it comes to the WPIAL section tournaments, advancing on to the WPIAL finals is the most important goal of any wrestler. However, if you are a team that is used to winning a sectional gold or two, not seeing one of your own atop the medal stand is pretty disheartening.
That fate was facing West Greene as it hosted the Section 1-AA tournament. With eight of their wrestlers already advanced to next weekend’s WPIAL finals, they were still without a champion. Their last chance came to the mat in the form of senior 171-pounder Patrick Morris.
Morris, the number No. 2 seed, needed a win over top-seeded Ryan Watson of Burgettstown to keep the Pioneers from being held without a section champion for the first time in years.
“There was a little pressure there,” Morris said. “It’s individuals now, but for the team aspect, I had to let the school know that there was someone here to represent them as a champion.”
For six grueling, physical minutes the two went back and forth in a tight bout between two 20-plus bout winners. However, Morris gutted out a 5-3 victory to claim the crown and cap a huge night for the host Pioneers.
Their nine wrestlers advancing was the top performance of the three Greene County teams competing yesterday. Waynesburg Central, which played host to the Section 4-AAA tourney, saw eight of their own advance and Jefferson-Morgan, which wrestled at Mount Pleasant in the Section 2-AA tournament, will send seven to the AA Finals along with West Greene.
The top four finishers out of each section advanced to the AA WPIAL tournament, while only the top three made it out of AAA.
While his team met Hughes’ expectations of quantity as far as grapplers advancing to the WPIAL finals, he was a little disappointed with the quality of some of his boys’ work in their respective championship bouts.
“I wasn’t happy with the finals,” Hughes said. “I had some younger kids who did well here. I thought I had a chance at eight and up to 10 to advance. We saw some things we needed to work on.”
West Greene saw six grapplers make it to their respective finals. Their first shot at a championship came at 112 where Dakota Riffle fell to Patrick Gouin of Washington 8-0. Garrett Johnston was their next wrestler to have a shot at gold as he faced undefeated David Ivaschenko of South Park in 135 finals.
Though Johnston battled hard, he couldn’t quite pull the upset and dropped a 4-2 decision.
Josh Durbin started a run of four straight classes with a Pioneer in the finals at 145, but he too fell. Durbin was pinned by Joey Schneider of Chartiers-Houston.
Keith Watson was part of one of the most exciting matches of the night in the 152-pound finals. After falling behind 7-2 in the third, Watson battled back to tie the bout at 7-7 before falling 12-7 in OT to Kyle Appleby of Avella.
Tucker Conklin, West Greene’s standout 160-pounder looked like the team’s best bet to win gold as he battled Fort Cherry’s Sam Guidi. However, Guidi kept it close and the freshman pulled the upset, beating Conklin 3-1 before Morris finally struck gold for his team.
Advancing out of the consolation brackets for the Pioneers were Austin Barnhart (103, fourth), Colton Blumer (third place, 119) and Jacob Durbin (third place, 125).
Over in Mount Pleasant, the Rockets of J-M had two fewer grapplers advance to Charleroi than their West Greene counterparts, but they had one more champion.
Senior Brian Scritchfield got the championship round off to a good start for the Rockets as he took the gold with a 7-1 win over top-ranked Brett Yanok of Mount Pleasant.
Fellow senior Ty Basinger (135) advanced to the finals, but couldn’t grab a second gold for the Rockets as he fell to Mount Pleasant’s Zach Sheridan, the top seed.
J-M standout 189-pounder Ethan Virgili won the weight class by pinning Charleroi’s Dave Grillo in overtime for the Rockets’ second title.
Four more J-M grapplers will be heading to Charleroi next weekend as 119-pounder James Miller and 140-pounder Craig Johnson won their respective third place bouts and Quincy Hathaway (152) and Zach Doman (285) finished fourth.
“We wrestled really well, except we had two let downs where we could have had two more go on at 160 and 171,” said Jefferson-Morgan head coach Scott Rhodes. “If they would have won, they would have gotten two more into the medal rounds.”
Up in AAA, the Waynesburg Raiders put on an impressive showing in front of their home crowd as they qualified eight for their WPIAL finals, which will be held this upcoming Thursday, Friday and Saturday at Canon-McMillan High School.
Freshman 103-pounder Zach McGinnis got things started in the championship round for WCHS as he dropped a tough 7-3 decision to Alex Dunaway of McGuffey. Fellow freshman Derrick Nelson (119) was the first of three Raider champions as he pinned Ringgold’s Dean Mathies in 3:28 to take the gold.
Waynesburg had another champion at 130 pounds as Brian Knapp gutted out a 2-1 decision win over Rico Borz of Bethel Park. Vincent Camps became the third Raider champion when he beat Samuel Scherich of McGuffey 3-2 in the 135-pound finals.
WCHS had a shot at a fourth title at 152, but Derek Calvert fell to top seed Nick Bonaccorsi from Bethel Park. Keith Higginbotham (189) and Jacob Butcher (285) also had shots at gold. Unfortunately for the Red and Black, Higginbotham fell 7-2 to Todd Miller of Ringgold and Butcher dropped a 10-5 contest to Nebojsa Nedic of Baldwin.
Freshman Alex Tegarden, who came into the tournament with just an 8-15 record, wrestled well as he placed third in 140 pounds. He beat Anthony Bonacci of West Mifflin by the final of 8-4 to advance.
The AA finals at Charleroi are scheduled to get started at 5 p.m. on Feb. 22 and at 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 23.
The AAA tourney is set to kick off at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 21, 5 p.m. on Feb. 22 and 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 23.