At last season’s Tunkhannock Holiday Wresting Tournament, Adam Buczynski busted onto the scene with a tournament championship.
But the Wyoming Area senior learned last week just how hard it is to defend a tourney title. The 182-pounder fell in the semis to Hanover Area’s J.J. Hooper, an up-and-coming junior for the Hawkeyes. Buczynski, who wrestled back to take third place and has a record of 9-3 this season, will be ready to show that he can contend for titles this weekend at the WVC Tournament, his coach said.
“That match didn’t go his way,” Warriors coach Jason Prokopchak said about the 182-pound semifinal. “It was nice to see him respond the way he did with a technical fall in the consolation semifinal and a fall in the (third-place match).”
Other Warrior wrestlers are following a similar path to Buczynski this season and there’s plenty of optimism around the team.
Despite entering just eight wrestlers into the Tunkhannock event, the team grabbed three medals and finished tied for 14th in the 26-team event. Joining Buczynski as a third-place medalist was junior heavyweight Damon Barhight, while junior 195-pounder Justin Joseph placed fifth despite wrestling up a weight class. Four Warrior grapplers also finished one win shy of medalling. Robin Wrobleski, Nick Semanek, Tyler Martin and Charlie Banashefski are underclassmen who were close to grabbing a medal.
“I saw a lot of improvements from my wrestlers,” Prokopchak said. “Things we’ve been working on hard in the offseason and the earlier part of the regular season, I’m seeing them put it into work in the actual matches, which is fantastic.”
Hawkeyes flying
With a new coach, some teams might recede a little bit. It’s still early in the season, but Hanover Area hasn’t missed a step under Rich Gavlick.
In fact, the Hawkeyes have shown improvement from last season so far. The Hawkeyes finished in fourth place last week at the Tunkhannock Holiday Wrestling Tournament with 134 points and seven medalists. Last year, the team finished sixth with 118 points and seven medalists. But this time around, the team grabbed three second-place finishes. In 2015, they had just one finalist in champion Jeff Bennett.
Bennett, the reigning OW of the District 2 Class 2A Individual Championships, added hardware to his collection last month when he also claimed the Outstanding Wrestler Award at the Towanda Dandy Duals, an event where the Hawkeyes finished third.
A stacked weight?
In a battle of state-ranked WVC wrestlers in the finals of last week’s Tunkhannock tournament, the Tigers’ Tommy Traver remained undefeated this season knocking off Hanover Area’s Jeff Bennett in the 132-pound final.
Nothing is set in stone, but it’s possible that those two get more state-ranked company at this weekend’s WVC Tournament. Hazleton Area’s Jimmy Hoffman, ranked No. 1 in the state at 138, is expected to drop to 132 eventually this season. Lake-Lehman’s RJ Driscoll was a state qualifier in 2015 and participated in the 132-pound bracket at last week’s Buckskin Classic.
Up until last week, Meyers’ Colin Pasone, a two-time state qualifier, was also wrestling at 132.
Traver is the only one of the aforementioned who is undefeated this season.
“I need to step up my game a little bit more,” the sophomore said. “I’d like to wrestle all the good guys. You gotta wrestle the best to be the best.”
Looking ahead
The WVC Tournament is being held on Friday and Saturday at Lake-Lehman High School for the eighth year. In the previous seven years no team has ever repeated as team champion two years in a row. Tunkhannock is the reigning champion, but the early favorite is Hazleton Area. The only time the Cougars have won the event was in the inaugural year, 2010. Other favorites are Coughlin, which won in 2015, and Dallas, Lake-Lehman, Hanover Area and Meyers, which have never won the event.
Seven wrestlers return this season as reigning champs. The number includes two-time champs Pasone from Meyers, and Hazleton Area’s Hoffman. The Cougars’ Jake Maurer and Carson Kinney, Wyoming Valley West’s David Krokowski and Lake-Lehman’s Driscoll were titlists last year, while Hanover Area’s Bennett won gold in 2015.
Bennett, his teammates Noah Rakowski and Nick Hannon were second-place finishers at last year’s conference event, as were Tunkhannock’s David Gavek and Sam Rice, Meyers’ Jeremy Bergold and Preston Perkins, and Coughlin’s Jake Brown.
