Monache wrestling 8th at CIT
Cardwell wins at 170 pounds
Monache High School boys wrestling finished eighth in the 64th annual Sam Boyd California Invitational Tournament, at Morro Bay High School.
The Marauders had three wrestlers finish in the top eight, led by junior Mark Cardwell who won the 170-pound weight class.
With more than 70 teams competing, Buchanan of Clovis scored 207 points to claimed the overall team championship. Monache totaled 107 points, one point behind Royal High who finished in seventh.
“Our staff was very pleased on how the overall team preformed but as always there is room for improvement. We are missing a few key wrestlers due to injury, and we have quite a few that had to dig deep to compete this weekend considering they were not feeling up to par being sick,” MHS coach Arthur Demerath said. “I had some concerns going in, knowing that we had wrestlers either becoming sick or trying to recover over this flu bug that seems to hit everyone, but the kids stepped up and wanted to compete and showed their heart and drive to succeed. As a coach you can’t ask for much more than that and I’m very proud of all their performances this weekend.”
Cardwell had a dominating tournament and was the overall champion. On his way to the finals, Cardwell scored two wins by pin, a technical fall, and a 7-3 win over 20th-ranked Ben Gould of Valencia in the semifinals.
In the finals, Cardwell was pitted against 11thranked Issaya Finley of
Righetti. This was one of the most entertaining matches of the finals, Demerath said, with Cardwell taking a 6-3 lead going into the third round, it seemed to be over, but Finley chose down and after a onepoint penalty was awarded to Finley for Cardwell fleeing the mat, Finley was within two points.
Finley escaped to bring the score to one point, and with 9 seconds left secured a controversial
takedown out of bouds.
Cardwell being poised and determined, Demerath said, quickly tied the match with a quick escape, and with 8 seconds left, Cardwell aggressively attacked his opponent and was able to secure a buzzer-beating takedown to win 8-6.
“Things Champions are made of,” Demerath said.
Jared Callison (120 pounds) had a great tournament finishing in
third place only suffering one loss in the semifinals by the score of 8-7. In the third-place match, Callison defeated 30thranked Adrian Heras of Turlock by fall.
Jose Flores (138 pounds) finished in seventh place. Flores only a freshmen lost two close matches both by one point, but in the seventhplace match, he was able to avenge an earlier loss to Tyler Okada of Servite by the score of 7-3.