EVANSTON – The Puncher girls had two meets this week competing in Evanston in the Evanston Girl duals. That night I really felt our girls team members really came a long way. We had five wrestling due to  illness and injuries.

But Charlie Smith is off to a very strong start to this year. She was able to pin all of her opponents that night. I was impressed with the improvement of Kristine Young.  She is an aggressive wrestler and really looked strong that night wrestling and had probably the two most exciting matches in the day. Kamia Runyan is one of our hardest workers in practice and it really shows on the mat. He technique has come a long way in two weeks and we see good things going forward.

Aurora Rees was in her first competition. And she performed very well for her first time.  Addison Statham was our final wrestler that night and she is a go-getter on the mat. She is very aggressive and is constantly attacking. The girls love going to these meets, where it is just them competing, and we will look for other options in the future to do the same thing.

Aimone Invitational

On Saturday, the Punchers were in Kemmerer for the Joe Aimone Invitational. This meet again is a pool meet, where each wrestler got to compete in four to six matches. I felt we started off a little slow put as the day wore on we got better in each and every match. It was a great meet and some weight classes were very deep with a lot of strong competition for us.

I also liked how competitive the varsity and JV pools were, where each athlete was able to compete in equal competition. 

Our strengths this week were again on our feet. We have done a great job of attacking our opponents and earning takedowns. It is key for us to earn that first point and we spend a lot of time working on our feet to earn that takedown. It is paying off. I also thought this week we worked on being in a better position once we earned that take down and that was vastly improved this week.

We still need to work on our conditioning and that is on me to do that for the team. I need to be better than when we return out of break. 

Highlighted wrestlers for this meet:

We had six athletes win their pool.

• Dominic Sanchez had another solid week of wrestling.  In fact, he defeated the only person to beat him this year in his first match. It was a great start to the day. He went on to win five matches with 4 pins.

• Jackie Meador also had a solid day going 5-0 with four pins. I felt he was a lot better on his feet this week and just wrestled better.

• His brother Saki Meador was 6-0 with five pins to win his pool. Saki was probably our most improved wrestler this week. His hard work in the room is starting to pay off.

• Rodger Young also had a great week also going 4-0 with four pins. He was able to defeat a wrestler who beat him twice last year, which is a huge confidence boost for him. 

• Zef Zuniga also went 5-0 with five pins in his pool. Zef showed vast improvement on his offense. We still have some work to do but I know he will work hard to reach that goal.

• Charlie Smith was another 2-0 on Saturday and was 3-0 on Thursday so her week was 5-0 with five pins.  Charlies is a mean wrestler and you better be ready for a fight when you step on the mat with her.

• We also had four wrestlers place second in their pools, only losing one match. Caleb Brown had a very solid performance after an early loss – he had four pins after that loss. Zavier Clifford’s only defeat was to his teammate and he had four pins as well. Robert French had a huge week this week, going 5-1 with five pins. What I love is he is finally trusting his offense. And Addison Kinnamon was dominant in her four matches this week. For a freshman first-year wrestler she is performing very well.

We are off this week and then we will head into break.  We will return with a conference dual in Shoshoni then have the Shoshoni dual tournament the next day.  It will be a great week to see where we stand in our conference because we will see most of our conference there at that meet.