Petersburg High School’s wrestling team sent 14 wrestlers to Craig last weekend for three days filled with matches.
Assistant coach Rob Schwartz made the trip with the Vikings and he says they wrestled as much as they could over the weekend. “Wrangell and Craig were there Thursday,” said Schwartz. “We set up a scramble we call it for the whole weekend. It’s not a tournament, it’s not a round robin really. You set it up on the computer and just wrestle everybody you can in your weight class. And so, yeah the Vikings really showed me a lot of promise this weekend. Number one we had four guys that just to earn their way onto the mat needed to put at least eight miles to make their weight. So they’d run, get their weight down, weigh in, make their weight, go wrestle and the next day get up and go run another eight miles.”
Scwartz said those four were Teagan Schwartz, Buddy Stelmach, Mike File and Sebastian Davis. Besides the scramble, wrestlers also competed in round robins and a final four tournament. Some ended up wrestling in over 10 matches for the three days.
In that final four, Stelmach took first at 120 pounds. Schwartz said he looks to be on a mission ever since the Anchorage Christian School tournament earlier this month. “I’ve coached him a long time since he was a little kid and I’ve never seen him so focused, asking questions, looking at situations, what he can do, starting to get strategic,” Schwartz said. “He just walked all over his opponents. It wasn’t even a contest. He’s physically strong. He’s not nice. He’s mean. He didn’t do anything dirty or necessarily mean on the mat, he’s just gritty mean. He just took what he wanted to take, pinned his opponents and onto the next match.”
Also in that final four tournament, Chase Lockhart took second at 220 pounds and Israel Collison (CALL-is-un) was third at 106. In other highlights, Teagan Schwartz went 7-3 on the weekend at 113 pounds. Julia Niemi won about half her matches at 132 pounds.
Mike File had 10 wins and one loss after dropping weight to get to 138 pounds. Ethan File won about half of his matches at 145.
Schwartz said Nick Hofstad surprised a lot of people in the 160 pound weight class. “He makes everybody nervous because he’s technical but more than that he’s just a fighter and you’re never safe with him. He’s just coming at you all the time. That’s what I like. It’s old school Viking wrestling, just attack attack attack attack and he just never gives up. And so he beat some guys pretty good, I think he was 10-2 on the weekend. He lost to some upperclassmen. Nick’s a sophomore.”
At 182, Kirk Evens won about two-thirds of his matches.
Next up for the Vikings is a tournament in Sitka at the beginning of next month. Then the region five tournament is in mid-December in Petersburg.
