Article by Juan Gomez
Saturday, the Whitewater JV Wrestling team took part in the 5th annual Wisconsin Wrestling Challenge Series Regional. There were eight Regionals going on throughout the state. The JV wrestling team wrestled at Middleton High School. Unlike the regular state tournament series The Challenge Series is made up of all three divisions so the Whippets competed against athletes from any school in their region, including Stoughton, Lake Geneva, and Elkhorn. This served as a good test for the Whitewater JV wrestling team to measure up on the mat. The whippets had fourteen wrestlers who took part in the tournament. The team started the day off strong although some wrestlers did take some hard losses. The coaches are proud to have four wrestlers reach the semifinals and elated to have two of those four athletes move on. Diego Tovar and Denver Isbell took third place in this really tough wrestling tournament and will be representing themselves and our school at the Wisconsin Wrestling Challenge Series. They get an opportunity to take part in one of the largest in-season jv wrestling tournaments on Saturday, January 19 is Wausau, WI. They should be proud of their accomplishment.
Other student-athletes that did well during the tournament included; Dylan Duclos and Crisitan Reyes, each taking fourth and will be alternates for the challenge series finals. Gavin Fritz, Brianna Staebler and Victor Hernandez each took 6th place and Blake Wegner placed 8th out of 19 in his weight class. Cooper Hammond had a very nice day coming away with a record of 3-2 with a couple pins but was one win short of placing.