VALLEY CENTER
Title No. 10 — and the first at Emporia High for the coach.
Sal Tovar earning a championship and setting a school record for wins in one dramatic, career-closing match.
Lorenzo Serna ending the tournament with a championship win.
Seniors, juniors and a sophomore all shook off Day One losses to pick up key points on the back side.
Emporia’s 2009 State wrestling championship delivered treat after treat, and the fact that the title may have seemed inevitable since the season began won’t make all this championship candy any less sweet.
The Spartans proved on Friday and Saturday at the Kansas Coliseum what the rankings said all season long: there was no Class 5A team like them. They had the studs, the depth and the focus to win it all, and with Tovar’s and Serna’s championships leading nine medalists, the Spartans and coach Greg Buckbee etched their names in the most important chapter of Emporia’s thick wrestling history book.
“It’s pretty special to win the first team State championship at your alma mater,” said Buckbee, who also won a title coaching Arkansas City in 2003. “It’s been several years now, and we’ve just gotten better every year, and we got the job done.”
EHS finished with 159.50 team points, 7.50 ahead of second-place Lansing. A senior class that sent seven of Emporia’s 13 State qualifiers became the latest group of EHS grapplers — but the first since 2000 — to end their long history of wrestling together with a State title.
“Our slogan is ‘Finish (the) Job,’ and today, we finished the job,” Tovar said. “And it’s pretty exciting to go out of your four-year career in high school wrestling with a State championship individually, and team, and (with the record) a triple crown, also.”
Tovar, fellow senior Tavo Dikin and Serna, a junior in his first State tournament, entered Saturday’s championship finals with, in theory, at least a little pressure to lock up the team title. Lansing, which trailed by 23.5 points after Friday’s tournament action, had cut the Spartans’ lead to 13.5 as the finals began, and the Lions also had three wrestlers in the championship finals.
When the first two Lansing finalists, Bo Pursel at 103 pounds and Spencer Blew at 130, won championships by a decision and by fall, it cut Emporia’s lead to just 3.5 points right before Tovar’s championship match at 135. So on top of trying to win an individual title, and trying to break Dusty Spaulding’s school record of 131 career victories, Tovar also had the close team score to worry about. Or did he?
“It didn’t really make me too nervous,” Tovar said. “I knew we’d get the job done.”
Tovar ran roughshod over the 135-pound field on Friday — with two quick pins sandwiched around a major decision — in reaching the final against Winfield’s Vance Oliver, the pair’s first meeting ever. Tovar quickly saw up close that this new opponent, who entered with a record of 28-5, would be tougher, as Oliver scored a takedown with a little more than a minute left in the first period. Tovar came back with an escape later in the first and then another one in the second to tie the match at 2-2 heading into the third period.
The score was the same when the two grapplers went out of bounds and came back to center ring with just 35 seconds remaining. Oliver got on top of Tovar, but Tovar got his arm around Oliver’s right leg, scored a takedown and then immediately sealed the win with three near-fall points, ending up on top by a 7-3 score to end his career with a 132-34 mark.
The team title was in the bag for the Spartans when Serna took the mat in the heavyweight title fight against Bishop Carroll’s Tony Marquez, but he had the opportunity to deliver a climactic finale. The two were unable to move each other off their feet for the first period, but early in the second, Marquez escaped Serna to go up 1-0. Starting the third period in the down position, Serna immediately got on the board with an escape of his own to tie it.
With a section of EHS students loudly chanting “Let’s go ’Zo-o,” Serna finally took Marquez down for two points with around 1:10 remaining, then grabbed three near-fall points on top of that to go up 6-1. After finishing off the 6-2 win, Serna pointed to EHS fans on either side of the Coliseum and soaked in the win, allowing the referee to hold his arm high for an extended period.
“There haven’t been very many heavyweight champions (at Emporia), and I was really motivated to push myself to be one of them,” Serna said. “You live forever in the wrestling ring, and I wanted to be one of those people.”
Serna joined Tovar in becoming EHS’s first individual State champions since 2004.
“Sal’s worked so hard four years,” Buckbee said. “Lorenzo has just worked and gotten better all the time, working with (former EHS heavyweight) Josh Rodriguez for the last several years. And then stepping in this year and (winning) the State championship, just well-deserving.”
Dikin had to settle for a second-place individual finish at 140 pounds, never really getting anything going in his finals bout with Valley Center’s Cade Blair, a returning state champion. Blair notched a takedown in the first period and an escape in the second for a 3-0 lead, and held on despite a late escape by Dikin that made the final 3-1.
Dikin said afterward he felt that he could have wrestled better and beaten Blair to make it three individual crowns for the Spartans. But...
“Like I said before, a team comes before individual,” he said. “That’s our No. 1 goal. We got it, so I can’t be disappointed.”
Emporia entered Saturday leading Lansing by 23.5 points. Buckbee said after Friday’s action that the back side would be key to Emporia locking up the title, and the Spartans put up a commendable performance in the consolation rounds, with six other wrestlers placing.
Junior Mark Kolmer, the state’s top-ranked wrestler at 189 pounds, was despondent on Friday night after losing a late lead and getting upset by Liberal’s Nate Davis in double overtime in Friday’s semifinals. But rather than mope through the back side, Kolmer got the job done Saturday, earning a 2-0 win over Seaman’s Steven Cooksley and scoring a takedown with about 20 seconds remaining in the third-place bout to beat Dylan Matheny of Kapaun by a 4-2 count. In the aftermath of the Spartans’ win, Kolmer could finally smile.
“Last night was pretty rough, but coming through the back side and finishing with the rest of the team, it really helped,” he said.
Sophomore Chase Sanchez also earned a third-place medal at 145 pounds, notching a 10-1 major decision over Washington’s Byron Roath in the third-place match. Justin Rose, after getting knocked out of the championship bracket in the quarterfinals in his fourth trip to State, earned a fifth-place medal for Emporia at 130 pounds, ending his run by beating Great Bend’s Nick Schwager in a 4-1 decision. Fellow senior Zeb Peak finished sixth at 152, and junior Logan Gaskill earned sixth place at 160.
“I felt like I wrestled a lot better today than I did yesterday,” Rose said. “If I wrestled like this yesterday, I probably wouldn’t be sitting in fifth place. But I’m excited — I placed all four years, and it’s all good to me.”
“It’s great to top it off with a State championship,” Peak added. “That’s the best way to go off as a senior.”
The Spartans’ best tournament surprise had to be junior Colby Walecki at 125 pounds. He didn’t start the year on varsity, and he entered State with a season record of 12-11. But after losing his opening-round match in overtime on Friday, Walecki was superb, winning four back-side matches to reach the third-place match, which he lost to Salina South’s Steven Plott 7-0 to finish fourth.
“What a wonderful job,” Buckbee said. “Steps in halfway through the season onto the varsity mats and just continued to get better, and then (to) come to the tournament and get fourth at State — I mean, what a tremendous, tremendous heart.”
Emporia’s other State qualifiers — seniors Jared Dakin, Taylor Lee and Jordan Barr and freshman Bryce Dakin — fell short of medaling in their brackets, but like their teammates, they’ll soon be the owners of shiny new championship rings.
“I’ve known these guys since I was 6 years old,” Rose said, “and I wouldn’t want to win it with anybody else but these guys.”
Finally, nine years after title No. 9, Emporia is at double digits — one of the motivational markers for this weekend’s memorable run.
“We talked about a lot of things, but we also tried to stay focused,” Serna said. “We didn’t want to over-think it and come in here and choke. But we did a good job of staying on task and wrestling. And now that we won what we wanted, it feels great.”
“They worked through some adversity,” Buckbee said. “They didn’t have the best tournament, they didn’t have the best draws, they didn’t have the best Friday. But they worked through that adversity and came out on top. And that’s what’s important.”