El Dorado ready for state tournament
El Dorado’s wrestling teams made waves with its postseason debut last month.
Now the time has come to see if they build on that momentum.
Starting today through Friday, the Arkansas Activities Association State Wrestling Tournament will be held at the Jack Stephens Center in Little Rock.
The girls tournament will be held in its entirety today with the boys to follow on Thursday and Friday.
Although EHS had great success at the conference tournament, none of their wrestlers were able to get seeded for the state tournament.
“It’s a little bit different because when it comes to conference, you just seed the six to nine teams in your conference. For state, you have to take the other side of the state into account,” El Dorado co-head coach Cherokee Streetman said.
“Unfortunately, none of our wrestlers got seeded this year. There’s a bunch of different criteria that has to be met. They look at headto-head records, last year’s top six
placers at state and conference champions. There's a bunch of different things that come into play.”
With none of the wrestlers seeded, they were placed into a draw with the brackets being announced earlier this week, and Streetman said there is an opportunity for his wrestlers to have success.
“For the boys and girls tournament, I feel like we have a very good opportunity to go out and compete against some opponents that have similar records as us,” Streetman said. “There are a few of our wrestlers that ended up drawing some pretty good first round opponents, and those matches will be tough. We are expecting some good things to happen though.”
The tournament was pushed back a week due to last month's winter storm, and Streetman said the extra week benefited the wrestlers.
“The extra week off, I was worried about losing focus and momentum, but the kids have been really great,” Streetman said.
“They've gotten after it this week. It was time for us to heal up our bodies. Ethan Faith was out with a concussion. Tyler Finch was out with a rib injury. Guys that would've had two or three days of practice time before the state tournament, now they've got two full weeks, so I believe they're a lot more prepared than they would've been had it been on schedule.”
Streetman said practices early on were physical before the focus turned to conditioning.
“When it comes down to the work that we've been putting in, we've been conditioning a lot,” Streetman said. “That's probably what 80 percent of our practices have been is some type of conditioning and running. Last week, we tried to be pretty physical with our practices. A lot of live wrestling. We put them in different scenarios, whether its you start in a neutral position where both wrestlers are up or you go to a takedown or one person starts on top and the other is on the bottom, and the bottom person has to escape or the top person has to put them on their back, something like that. It was pretty physical. The end part of the week was a lot of conditioning. A lot of running.
“Now we're emphasizing, ‘This is what you're going to do in the match,' so that's all we worked on. It was more live wrestling, but without the intensity.
“The athlete may go through, ‘Hey, what takedown are you going to do? What breakdown are you going to do? What turn are you going to do? What type of pin are you going to do?' We'll put everything together and go through the mental preparation that it takes in order to go out to a match and do that exact same scenario as they would in practice.”
With this being their first trip to the state tournament, Streetman is hoping the wrestlers will not only have success on the mat, but also enjoy competing against the state's best.
“The atmosphere is just unbelievable,” Streetman said. “This year is different because of COVID, so they're limiting spectators to I believe right over 1,000. There's going to be six different mats on the floor, and you have no idea who is cheering for who. You hear the whole fanbase going crazy, and you don't know who they're cheering for, but in your mind, they're cheering for you, so that's exciting.
“You just hope that when you get there, the kids can take it in, take a step back from the wrestling part of it and appreciate the work they've put in to get here and they can enjoy some of the things that go along with the wrestling.
“We want the athletes to love wrestling, have fun and enjoy it, so I think that's part of what the state tournament is all about.”