After a deceiving 58-18 win in their last Northern Nevada dual meet, the Carson High wrestling team sent a strong message to the region with a 58-10 win over South Tahoe on Wednesday at Morse Burley Gymnasium.
"Carson's got a real good dual team, they're just a better team than us," said Viking coach Jack Lopez. "We're not foolish. We've been following them all year. We wish them the best of luck. They're going to have their hands full against Fallon and Douglas."
The Tigers, which beat the Senators 37-29 in the Carson City Duals in December, come to Carson next Wednesday for the highly anticipated rematch. And this time around, coach Dean Schmanski will have his entire squad against Douglas, which hasn't a lost a dual meet in both league and non-league competition this season.
The Senators, who improved to 4-0 with the win over South Tahoe, forfeited two matches the first time against Douglas and had to bump everyone up two weight classes.
"That's not going to happen this time, but Douglas is going to be tough for match us," Schmanski said. "We're going to have to be at our best. We're really looking forward to that one."
South Tahoe didn't really pose much of a challenge to Carson yesterday, but Lopez expected that. The match started at the 171-pounders and the Senators' Tony Nu-ez started things off with a 13-2 win over Oscar Graham. In the 189-pound match, Nick Shine, the top ranked wrestler in his weight class in Northern Nevada, recorded the first of three pins in the match for Carson when he pinned Nathan Sweeney 15 seconds into the second period.
"We're just very, very young," Lopez said. "That's not an excuse because Carson's got a very good club. We had eight sophomores and one freshman tonight but for us to only give up three pins, that's remarkable."
In the 215-pound match, Allen Wooldridge trailed J.P. Foster 11-10 with only a minute left in the final period before pulling out a thrilling 16-12 victory in the final seconds. The Vikings' heavyweight, David Vasquez pinned Jason Klug with 40 seconds left in the third period. Vasquez is the fourth-ranked heavyweight in the region.
Carson led 13-6 going into the 103-pound match, when South Tahoe's Garret Gibb defeated Senator freshman Mark Graham 13-2. Carson, which was leading 13-10, then won the next nine matches, two of them by forfeit and two more by pin. In the 130-pound match, Chris White pinned Jared Freeny with 35 seconds left in the second period and Chandler Brown pinned Ryan Andrews with 1:17 left in the third in the 135-pound match.
In the Senators' 40-point win over the Huskies earlier this month, there were only eight duals because of Reno forfeits. And in those matches, Carson went 4-4 and only outscored the Huskies 22-18. That's hardly the decisive margin it had against South Tahoe and now Schmanski thinks his squad is ready for the showdown against Douglas. First, though, the Senators have dual against North Valleys on Saturday. The Panthers will only have six wrestlers, Schmanski said.
"Overall, I thought we wrestled well," Schmanski said. "Sure, there's some things you're always going to have to work on but I saw things in some matches today that we've been working on in practice. That's nice to see that they are responding to what we're trying to work on in practice. We didn't pin a lot of guys but we finished strong."
