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By Riley Bean
Springfield, MO – Kickapoo hosted Glendale and Hillcrest in a wrestling triangular Tuesday.
This triangular was the first contest of the year for each of these three teams. Glendale beat Hillcrest 60-19 and beat Kickapoo 42-39 in a thrilling dual to end the evening.
Falcons head coach Bud Donnell is pleased with his team’s performance to begin the season, and it puts Glendale in the driver’s seat to achieve one of their major goals.
“There’s a travelling banner between the SPS schools and Springfield Catholic. It’s a city championship banner,” Donnell said. “Kickapoo has won it the past two years and we’ve finished second. So this is a huge step. By beating Kickapoo and Hillcrest, we’re one step closer to getting our banner back hanging in our wrestling room. So the city championship was on the line and we were getting after it.”
The lopsided outcomes in the duals involving Hillcrest are a result of eight “open” weight classes for the Hornets. First year Hillcrest head coach Kris Wood says this season will be a work in progress.
“We just gotta work on technique out there,” said Wood. “We’ve got a lot of kids who are juniors and seniors who this is their second year wrestling. So we’ve really got to work on building the program from the bottom up.”
He’ll have a couple of guys to lean on in his first year with the program. Quinci Attyberry (182 pounds) and Tyler Tindle (195 pounds) each won both of their matches on the night. Attyberry beat Glendale’s Drew Hayes 17-4 and Kickapoo’s Noah Jennerjohn 7-6, while Tindle pinned both of his opponents.
But the dual between the Chiefs and the Falcons was saved for last, and for good reason. The two teams traded wins by fall all night long, but Glendale was able to pull off the three-point victory in the end.
Of the fourteen weight classes, thirteen of them had competitors participate from both teams. And of those thirteen bouts, twelve of them ended in a win by fall – six by each team.
“We’ve got to stop from getting pinned, number one,” said Kickapoo head coach Billy Buckley. “That’s the biggest thing. We’ve got to turn that in our favor. We’ve got to get off our backs. The beauty about wrestling is there are a lot of things you can always work on to improve on that. It’s a long season and we’ll work on that.”
The one match that went to a decision was the 220 bout between Glendale’s Brett Davis and Kickapoo’s PJ Walker. Walker defeated Davis in a 3-1 decision.
With Glendale earning six points because of Kickapoo having an “open” spot at 120 pounds, and because of the decision victory instead of a fall in the Walker-Davis match, Glendale was able to beat the Chiefs 42-39 and leave with a sweep.
“It’s Kickapoo Glendale,” said Coach Donnell. “It’s the one rivalry that we circle on the calendar that we’re geared up for. Our football team kind of razzed me earlier saying volleyball beat [Kickapoo], football beat ‘em, so we need to step up as well. Knowing that they have more students than us, it doesn’t really affect us, it just gets us going.”
Furthermore, because of certain weight certifications, Glendale had five wrestlers wrestling above their weight class on Tuesday, making the win that much more impressive.
Bailey Fisher (126), Chris Hansen (132), Logan McDonald (152), Bryce Clark (160), and Marcus Reimonenq (170) will each be wrestling at a lighter weight once the season gets rolling, according to Coach Donnell.
Gene Keiber pinned McDonald and Clement Roggen pinned Clark, but Fisher, Hansen and Reimonenq all pinned their Kickapoo opponent.
Kickapoo’s Coach Buckley was pleased with the atmosphere in their home arena in Tuesday’s triangular.
“I hope it encourages more people to come,” he said. “It’s an exciting sport and I think a lot of people lose out on that fact because of the lack of knowledge of the sport. I think hopefully tonight, we didn’t get the win, but hopefully tonight we gained a couple fans just by the atmosphere. It was a great atmosphere. Growing the sport in general and having our kids do a little bit better would have been great, but it is what it is and we’ll go back to the room and work on it.”
