KARL PEARSON
GENEVA — It’s a bus ride of roughly two hours from south of Akron to Geneva High School, so the Manchester wrestling squad must have been pretty confident of itself to embark on such an adventure Saturday morning.
First-year coach Panther Greg Brown might have even considered dropping out of the Tom Koehler Duals tournament since he didn’t set up the trip. But he and the Panthers decided to keep the commitment. They were glad they did, too, as they took the field of the eight-team tournament named for the founder of Geneva wrestling by storm, ringing up more than 60 points in three of its four wins and also earning a pretty convincing 41-24 victory in the opening round over the host Eagles to claim the title.
Manchester capped its day with a shutout, sweeping aside Conneaut, 67-0, in the championship round. They earned seven pins and four major decisions against the Spartans, who defeated Wickliffe, Euclid and Benedictine to get to that round.
Brown wore a big smile in assessing the performance of the Panthers, who looked like they could make an impact at the Division III state tournament in March.
“It’s my first year here, so the pieces of this weekend were all put together by the previous coach,” he said. “It’s a nice tournament.
“We had some good matchups against some good guys and generally looked good in those. We’re starting to get healthy again. We had our 171 just back for his second time and our 160 is also just back.”
He’s hoping that will all pay dividends at the state tournament.
“We’d like to get into the top 10 (in the team standings) this year,” Brown said.
The match against Manchester was a shot of reality for Conneaut (16-9), which had looked good to that point.
“The first three matches I thought we wrestled really well,” first-year coach Matt Bidwell said. “The last match showed how much work we still have to do.
“We have a lot of improvement to make. (The Panthers) are working at a much higher level than we are right now. They’re where we need to get to. I think we showed we’ve made improvement, but we need to be more where Manchester is at as we start to get ready for the sectional and district tournaments.”
Geneva (7-3) got a dose of reality from Manchester in the first match of the day. Coach Dwight Fritz felt the Eagles may have actually benefited from it and picked up their game after that for solid wins over Jefferson and Euclid and an equally convincing victory over Bedford to finish third.
“I think we got a little learning experience today,” he said. “Manchester’s a pretty good team and they wrestled real well against us.
“I think that helped us out for the rest of the day. Days like this and what we have coming up next weekend in the Holy Wars at NDCL and with (Akron St. Vincent-St. Mary) should be really good for us.”
Jefferson coach Tom Avsec felt his team could have performed better, although he believes the Falcons are making progress. The Jefferson contingent got quite a scare in the Falcons’ second match when Adam Trout at 145 lost consciousness briefly, then complained of no feeling in his limbs and was taken by emergency medical staff for treatment. But he was back at the school later in the day, walking around and chatting with his teammates and coaches.
“He lost consciousness for a little bit, but he’s all right now,” Avsec said. “He has a slight concussion and was told to rest for a couple of days.”
As to the Falcons’ wrestling, Avsec hoped for better.
“I don’t think we wrestled up to our potential,” he said. “We got off on the wrong foot against Geneva and just couldn’t get it going after that.
“We lost a few matches we could have won. Our good guys did pretty well, though. I think we’re making some progress.”
