2012-13 Results and Media Coverage
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Baton Rouge — MacArthur continued to represent "The Sooner State" well and fittingly Saturday to the Deep South Bayou Duals' final match.
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The Highlanders took the 132-, 138- and 145-pound matchups from Catholic-Baton Rouge to begin the championship dual and rarely let momentum go in the 41-12 victory. "It's real important to get the ball rolling," MacArthur Coach Ellis Holt said. "If you stall out and win a match, lose a match, win a match, then lose a match, you never get the ball rolling. These kids feed off one another. They're young, and sometimes they wrestle over their head or wrestle higher than the level that's expected if the other guys can give them some room to start snowballing." Colby Powers and Brock Williams took one-point decisions from Matthew Mire and James Claitor, respectively, to do just that, and Colton Jump added four points to the total with a 16-2 defeat of Reid Burns for a 10-0 team lead.
Fast starts were the routine for the Oklahoma squad during the two-day event after — ironically — an opening-round bye during Friday's pool play. "It's pretty important to cheer your team up and start the dual off right and be able to keep everybody's confidence up," Powers said. "It was pretty tough. I didn't know what was gonna happen at the beginning of the match, but as the match went on, I could tell that he was getting tired, so I just pushed a little bit harder."
The Highlanders swept through four duals Friday without allowing a single point and beat Sam Houston, Brusly, Arlington (Tenn.) and Teurlings by a combined 306-0. MacArthur won the first 10 weight classes Saturday morning in a 52-9 quarterfinal defeat of Platte County (Mo.) and the first four in a 34-24 semifinal victory against Brother Martin that afternoon.
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The dominant scores didn't necessarily reflect the level of competition, Holt said. "There was a high level of wrestling here, and that's what we were hoping for," he said. "Some individuals throughout the tournament showed us that there's some high-level wrestling here in the South. We had never been down here before, but I was impressed with it. These coaches down here do a good job."
Catholic scratched the scoreboard against the Oklahomans earlier than anyone else at the 44-team tournament, but didn't do so early or often enough. Kevin Moran managed the Bears' first points, an 8-6 decision, in the 152-pound matchup against Blake Handley, but MacArthur responded in the 160- and 170-pound weight classes. Ricky McCarty took a 9-6 decision from Brandon Luck in the first of those matches, and Dillon White pinned Matthew Moreau in 4:39 in the latter.
"We lost too many one-point matches," Catholic Coach Tommy Prochaska said. "We lost (132) and (138), which were matches I thought we were gonna be able to get. (The) 160 I knew was gonna be a battle because their kid's a stud. It should've been closer than the score. In my opinion, it was closer than the score, but they're a good team, and hats off to them."
Christian Pittman, Caleb Sutton and Everett Knox won the 182-pound, 195-pound and 285-pound matches for Catholic. But Garrett Shaw took the 220-pound bout for MacArthur, which also dominated late with victories by Briar Adams, Reed Piatt, Cole Powers and Adrian Gaines in the 106-, 113-, 120- and 126-pound classes.
McCarty earned Outstanding Wrestler honors for the upper weight classes with a 7-0 effort on the weekend, including four pins. Nick "Tiggy Monster" Tighe of Phoenix (N.Y.) earned the distinction in the lower weight classes with an 8-0 record and six pins.
Brother Martin dominated Jesuit, 70-0, in a third-place dual played by a majority of reserve wrestlers. "It's a long tournament, and Jesuit needed to get some guys in, so we matched up backups" Brother Martin Coach Robert Dauterive said. "So that's not indicative of either team … It's really not about that third-place match. I believe that we were the second-best team here. Catholic's a very good team … but for us, we knew coming in, (MacArthur) was the team we had to beat, and we just fell short."
New Orleans' top finishers both came just short of big semifinal comebacks that would've sent them to the championship round.
Brother Martin gave MacArthur nearly all it could handle after initially falling behind, 19-0. The Crusaders drew back to within 22-18 before a Garrett Shaw pin of Josh Tapia in the 220-pound matchup turned momentum back in the Highlanders' favor.
Jesuit claimed the final four matches against Catholic with pins by Zachary Creel and Nicky Charles and decisions by Ben D'Antonio and Mitch Capella to overcome a 26-8 deficit and knot the Bears at 26-26, but an earlier foul for coaching misconduct cost the Blue Jays the tiebreaker. "I think our team feels good," Jesuit Coach Spencer Harris said. "You never wanna lose a match like that, but you know, coaches learn just like wrestlers do, but the guys wrestled really hard today, and I'm proud of 'em."
Jesuit had bounced back from the ropes earlier in the day just to reach the semifinals. The Blue Jays fell behind Phoenix, 33-6, in the quarterfinals with four matches to go when Dominic Carmello pinned Trever Ferens in the 220-pound class. "The whole match, I just thought, 'I really need to win this match. If I didn't win this match, we would lose,'" Carmello said. "I was looking for just a win actually, and then I got the opportunity to pin, and I just went for it, and I got him." Creel pinned Derrick Button in 23 seconds in the ensuing 285-pound matchup, and Charles and Capella claimed majors against Seth Gilbert and Remi Lynch for the 36-33 victory. "We knew our heavyweights, both our heavyweights, are very good, so we knew that they could get pins," Capella said. "So one of our coaches told the whole team, he said, 'Look, we're down, but if everybody wins and we get some bonus points, we'll win, and we've got some of our best wrestlers left.'
"I've always kind of wanted that to happen to me, so I was really happy to win it for my team."
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