The Jackson County wrestling team opened up their season this past weekend at Allatoona High School with a fifth place finish at the Blackbeard Duals.
The team went 3-2 on the weekend and had wins over Etowah, Kennesaw Mountain and Allatoona, but came up short against Woodland and North Forsyth.
Some of the top wrestlers for the Mat Panthers this weekend were D.J. Ledford, who went 4-1, Ryan Shekey, who went 4-1, Tre’ Horton, who went 4-1, Izzy Carrillo-Garcia, who went 4-1, Jamari Davis, who went 4-1, Ryan Howe, who went 4-1, Austin McDonald, who went 4-0 and Charles Smothers, who went 4-0.
“Going into this weekend I knew that we had a strong line-up, but I was very concerned about the matches that we were giving up through the middle of our line-up,” said coach Jason Powers. “Every match we went into we were down 0-6 or 0-12 due to forfeits. This makes wrestling a dual tournament against tough competition very difficult. However, we knew the challenge that faced us and we did a good job rising to the occasion.”
In a narrow defeat to Woodland, Jackson County fell just two points short of having a chance of wrestling in the tournament finals. The loss put the Panthers third in their pool, giving them the chance to wrestle Allatoona for the fifth and sixth place slots.
“Outside of giving up weight classes to forfeits, the number of pins we gave up really closed the door on the chance we had to win a lot of these matches,” Powers said. “To be a great dual team we must stop giving up so many pins. This is something we are going to work extremely hard on between now and January and hopefully by Area Duals and State Duals we can knock the number of pins we give up down to zero. If this happens, we should have the opportunity to wrestle for a state place.”
Powers said it was nice to get the first match of the year out of the way.
“For the first two or three weeks of practice you have to speculate on what your wrestlers need but now we know exactly what they need and what we need to work on. We have a long way to go to meet our goals for the year, but I definitely like where we are starting from. We have one of the strongest dual line-ups in the past couple of years and we just have to wait until the Panther Invitational to see what kind of tournament team we will have this year.”
For more on this story, see Wednesday's edition of The Jackson Herald or The Braselton News.
