Also serving the communities of De Luz, Rainbow, Camp Pendleton, Pala and Pauma

JV Holiday Duals successful financially and otherwise

Fallbrook High School’s wrestling program hosted the Junior Varsity Holiday Duals tournament Dec. 22, at the school’s west gym, and Fallbrook head coach Cristian Vera said the tournament was successful financially and otherwise.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better tournament,” Vera said. “First and foremost, it was a fundraiser for us and as far as fundraising goes it was a big success. In that aspect it was a bug success for us.”

Team entry fees and snack sales provided approximately $2,000 in net revenue for the Fallbrook program.

Organizing a tournament will allow the Fallbrook program to apply that experience when the CIF Division II meet is held at Fallbrook High School, Feb. 9.

“It was good practice for CIF,” Vera said.

The tournament also provided experience for the individual wrestlers.

“Every team that competed had great matches and great matchups throughout the entire day,” Vera said.

Ten schools competed in the JV Holiday Duals. Fallbrook placed third overall and first among CIF San Diego Section teams.

“It was good. As a team we performed very well,” Vera said. “We only lost one dual. Even in the dual that we lost we were very competitive.”

The 10 teams were split into two pools of five teams apiece. Each school had a full match against each of the other four schools in the pool.

Fallbrook won three of the four pool matches, losing only to Murrieta Valley High School by a 45-33 score.

“It came down to the wire. It came down to a couple of matches. We stayed competitive,” Vera said.

The fifth match of the day was between the schools with the same positions in each pool. Vista Murrieta High School and Murrieta Valley were the two pool winners, and Vista Murrieta High School defeated Murrieta Valley in the championship match.

“They were definitely the team to beat. They were definitely the most competitive team,” Vera said of Vista Murrieta.

Fallbrook and Escondido were the two teams with second-place pool results. Fallbrook won the third-place match against Escondido High School, which gave the Warriors third place and the Cougars fourth place.

The tournament had no requirement that wrestlers compete primarily in the junior varsity portion of dual meets, so some of the wrestlers also compete in varsity competition for Fallbrook. The matches count toward the maximum permissible 40 matches in the regular season, as do the Jan. 26 JV County Championships tournament matches which will be contested at Mt. Carmel High School.

The JV Holiday Duals rules also allow teams to use wrestlers from another school to fill out the 14 weight brackets. Fallbrook had grapplers in 11 of the weight classes.

The tournament did not have individual positions, but two of Fallbrook’s wrestlers won all five matches. Uriel Juarez was undefeated in the 138-pound bracket, and Matthew Kendall was victorious in his five 160-pound matches. Marco Alejandre wrestled in the 126-pound division and won four of his five matches.

“Those three guys definitely stood out,” Vera said.

Author Bio

Joe Naiman, Writer

Joe Naiman has been writing for the Village News since 2001

 

Reader Comments(0)

 
 
Rendered 03/24/2024 09:30