Late pin lifts East Harford to share of title with Danbury
TRUMBULL — There has never been a more closely contested Class LL wrestling State Championship than that of 2022.
Danbury led until the final bout, when East Hartford freshman 160-pound finalist Drayvn Roberts took to the mat.
Thanks to a pin by East Hartford’s Cooper Lavigne minutes earlier to claim fouth place in the 152-pound bracket, East Hartford needed Roberts to pin Ridgefield’s Andrey Kosygin to tie Danbury at 232 points.
“My team needed a pin to tie it up, so going into the match I was just thinking win and pin,” Roberts said. “That was some serious pressure, and I am just glad and blessed to be honest.”
Two minutes and 21 seconds into the last finals match, Roberts got his pin and East Hartford and Danbury were declared Class LL co-champions.
“It feels great, Danbury has been running LL’s for 35 years,” Roberts said. “Growing up I would watch my brothers wrestle and Danbury would always win. I would always think ‘they are not winning when I get to high school.’”
While Roberts and East Hartford got their win, for the sixth consecutive Class LL tournament Danbury did as well.
“East Hartford is a real good team. We hadn’t seen them all year,” Danbury coach Ricky Shook said. “We got the shared title and we wrestled well, I have to say. Next weekend at the Open should be interesting.”
For the East Hartford program, this is its first state wrestling title.
“These guys battled the whole season. We are a young team and three quarters of our team had never wrestled in high school,” East Hartford coach Todd Albert said. “They didn’t know what this would be like, but they had the mindset to be able to wrestle back. We had a rough go for a little while, but we battled back, and I couldn’t be prouder.”
Danbury ended with four first-place finishers in Kai
O’Dell (138), Logan Kovacs (145), Dominic Iaquinto (182), and Nuh Ajdinoski (285), while East Hartford had two individual title winners in Isaac Quiles (106) and Roberts (160).
For Danbury, Kovacs played the hero for the second tournament in a row. After winning the deciding match to claim the FCIAC team title, he was the final Danbury competitor again on Saturday, with his pin clinching another title.
“I knew going into it that this would be a close team race, so I had to do everything I could to help get the win,” Kovacs said. “I knew it was close so now this is two weeks in a row it has all come down to me for us. It is crazy because it is random the way they pick the order.”
O’Dell and Fairfield Warde’s Will Ebert were the only competitors to repeat as Class LL individual champions. Ebert was named the most outstanding wrestler of the tournament as the champion at 170 pounds.
“It feels great, there was not a lot of pressure honestly,”
O’Dell said. “I just wanted to show off all the hard work I have put in. We really just found a way today, which was awesome and we really come out when it matters in the postseason.”
Iaquinto and Ajdinoski were unexpected winners for the Hatters, with Ajdinoski
entering as the eighth seed and Iaquinto as the fifth in their respective weight classes.
“Coming in I knew I didn’t have anything to lose as the five seed,” said. “I didn’t care about the win or the loss, I cared about the effort I gave. I knew that I
could beat these kids, and it feels great to be a state champion. There is more to come, this is only the beginning.”
Fairfield Warde finished third with 204 points, while Ridgefield (146.5) and Southington (144.5) rounded out the top five.