Region Duals events start this weekend
The first part of a very busy wrestling playoff season begins this weekend when the three high schools in Gordon County all go to their respective Region Duals tournaments.
For Calhoun, they will be in the 7-5A tournament in Cartersville Saturday while Sonoraville, which won the 3A Duals state championship 3 years in a row from 2018 to 2020, will be in the 7-4A competition starting Friday afternoon at Heritage High School and Gordon Central will be at the Region 7-2A event in Rockmart Saturday.
“Things do slow down at this point,” Calhoun head wrestling coach Luke Green said. “I know we’ve been very busy lately with a lot of matches in December and a lot of matches for the kids. But once you get into the playoffs here, like we’re about to be in, things do slow down a little. You really at that point only have one match a week, but it is a big match because you’re talking about first the regional, and then the sectionals and then hopefully you have a bunch of guys going to the state tournament. And then you’ve got the traditional playoffs.
“And we’ve got one regular season match left between the Duals and the traditionals and it’s going to be a very tough meet. Just the type we need to help us get ready for the traditionals. So there is a lot of wrestling left, but the schedule does slow down.”
The Yellow Jackets are looking to get as many wrestlers as possible to the sectionals next week, but it won’t be easy because the 7-5A Region is pretty brutal with Cass the defending GHSA 5A Duals state champion and Woodland winning it all for a third consecutive year in 2021.
“We’ve finished third in our Region each of the past two years because we finished behind Cass and Woodland, which have won the last two state championships,” Coach Green said. “Those two programs are really doing well right now. But every team in our Region is good. Every team is very well-coached and every team has good athletes that are good wrestlers, so for us, and for just about everybody in this region, it’s
just a matter of getting through this region because if you do advance, you’ve got a chance to do very well and get to State I feel like.”
Junior Isaac Green in the 165-pound division has been a big threat for the Jackets all year long and the young man who has over 25 individual wins this winter is looking to make a third straight trip to the state tournament.
Sophomore Rex Richardson has also been wrestling well and he is looking to make a second consecutive trip to the state tournament. He has wrestled at 175 pounds most of this season and has faced the best that every tournament has had to offer.
Coach Green said he looks ready to go in the postseason.
“Rex is wrestling well,” Coach Green said. “He’s taking on some outstanding competition this year and really held his own. He’s just a very talented wrestler. He’s super aggressive. He is one of those six-minute guys you’re looking for in that he is active from the very first whistle until the last second. He just competes for the entire six minutes if that is what it takes because a lot of his matches, he’s ended them much earlier than that. But I am excited about what I think him, along with a lot of our guys, have a chance to do at the Region tournament.”
For Sonoraville, the Phoenix have been one of the best programs in the state the last few years and now they’re looking to earn their stripes at the 4A classification instead of the 3A, where they have had their recent success.
Head Coach Randy Steward said before the season begin that the move up in competition was just another challenge they would be looking to meet head-on and the key for everything was growth and improvement from the individuals themselves while they come together as a unit because he felt like they had a tremendous upside.
The Phoenix do have five wrestlers back who made it to the 3A state matches last year and they are seeking a return trip to Macon in a couple of weeks.
They also have a lot of other veterans in the fold who know what
this time of the year is all about and what it takes this time of the year to get to continue wrestling for the next few weeks when two state champions and a number of individual champions will be rewarded.
Sonoraville had three individual state champs last year and lost a tremendous senior group, but more than a few people have met their new challenge and now everyone is anxious to see how they do one division higher than in recent years.
For Gordon Central, what was Sonoraville’s headache in the past is now the Warriors’ problem in the present with defending 3A state champion Rockmart, which was part of the Phoenix’s region the last few years, now dropping to the 2A ranks and living in Gordon Central’s district.
“The GHSA certainly didn’t do us any favors by putting Rockmart in our region,” Gordon Central head wrestling coach Ricky Orr said. “We were in a very strong region the past couple of years with some very good teams but now just about the teams have changed and so you add them in the Murray County schools and Haralson (County) and then you throw in Rockmart, which was a 3A state champion last year, and our region just got that much tougher. But it’s like I tell the kids, we can’t worry about that. We’ve just got to go out and wrestle as hard as we can and give it our best effort no matter who we
are against and I got a lot of faith in my kids that will do just that.“
He has a very young group as they are freshman and he sophomoreheavy, but he still has high hopes that they can get a large group to the Sectionals next week with trips to the state tournament on the line.
“The main thing is we just keep chipping away,” Orr said. “Every match that we go to, we’ve just got to be ready to go out and compete as hard as we can. Our region won’t be easy but the Region we’ve been in in the past wasn’t easy, so we just want to be at our best. We feel like we’ll wrestling some very good teams to help us prepare for it.“