Late start advantage for Lions wrestling
It might not be the best way to navigate a scholastic wrestling season, but South Fayette has found a late start might not necessarily be a bad thing.
The Lions have been competing with a full team for about three weeks, the result of many of the wrestlers playing on the football team that won a second consecutive PIAA Class AA championship.
On Wednesday, South Fayette kept a perfect record in the subsection of Section 1 with a 48-26 victory over South Park.
The result assures the Lions a home match next Wednesday in the Section 1 Team Tournament. A match at Avella remains today (7 p.m.) to finish the section schedule.
“It’s nice for the kids to be home,” said South Fayette head coach Rick Chaussard. “You get to go in front of the home crowd and wreslte in your own gym. It’s nice to be at home.”
Jasper Wolfe (120), Rausaun Culbertson (195) and Thayer Phillips (220) had pins for the Lions.
In the feature bout of the night, Greg Bulsak of South Park edged Jared Walker, 8-5, at 170 pounds. It was Walker’s first loss of the season.
“It went back and forth,” Chaussard said. “J.J. gave up a late takedown in the second period that changed the match. J.J. went from down one at that time and our option to start the third to down three. Now, you’re chasing three instead of one.”
The Lions are 14-1 but don’t let the record fool you: 10 of those matches came in two separate dual tournaments, the Penn Hills Duals Dec. 20 and the South Side Beaver Duals Jan. 3.
“The kids have been working hard, working themselves into wrestling shape,” said Chaussard. “We didn’t look sharp or crisp at the Penn Hills Duals.”
Maybe that was the reason why the Lions lost their only match of the season, 42-36, to Shaler.
“We didn’t have the intensity for the Penn Hills Duals,” said Chaussard. “But our intensity was high at South Side. I don’t think we lost 10 combined bouts that day.”
The Lions will get another good workout this weekend when they travel to the Allegheny County Tournament at Fox Chapel High School. The 35-team tournament boasts such teams as North Allegheny, Pine-Richland, Hampton, Shaler, West Allegheny and Fox Chapel.
“It’s a very tough tournament,” said Walker, a state runner-up last year at 160 pounds. “They have some very good kids in it. I usually know a lot of the kids who wrestle in it.”
Walker might have lost the top seed in the Allegheny County Tournament with the loss to Bulsak, but there is still a lot of wrestling left to do.
“The time off has been a little bit of an advantage,” Walker said earlier in the week. “You have to get back into wrestling shape. You have to switch your mindset from football to wrestling.”