Eastside claims 19th wrestling state title by beating Lugoff-Elgin for AAAA crown

          Columbia – Another season completed, another championship won by the Eastside High School wrestling team.

         The Eagles defeated Lugoff-Elgin 62-12 to win the AAAA state championship on Saturday at the Dreher High gymnasium. It was the ninth consecutive state championship for EHS, adding to the state record it broke last year. Eastside secured another spot in the record books as this one was the 19^th for the program. That breaks a tie for the record with Rock Hill.

         “The big ones are the program records,” said Eagles head coach Jack Kosmicki, who has guided the program to 15 state titles in the last 19 seasons. So what’s the secret to the sustained success, coach?

         “I don't know,” Kosmicki said. “We go in and just do the same thing. If you talk to other teams, we just do the same thing every year. Drill it over and over and over again. It's monotonous and boring to the level it's almost painful. But we make sure everything they do, they do right. If it’s not right, then we do it again.

         “So there’s no secret recipe. It’s just hard work and wrestling right.”

         EHS finishes the season with a 37-0 record. It again dominated the same Demons program it beat for the championship last season by a 51-23 count.

         Eastside senior Jack Wyland has obviously won a team state championship each of his high school seasons. He closed out his duals career on Saturday and has yet to become bored with lifting the championship trophy.

         “It’s special every time,” Wyland said. “It doesn't really change. The feeling of being state champion is always amazing.”

                  L-E head coach Ted Monroe gave credit where it was due in regards to Eastside dynasty.

         “We're not intimidated by them. They're just really, really good,” said Monroe, whose team finished with a 39-10 record. “If you make any mistake against them, it's magnified over if you make that mistake against anybody else. We paid for some of those little mistakes that we made.”

         Lugoff-Elgin, which was ranked fifth in AAAA by scmat.com to Eastside’s No. 1 ranking, almost got on the board first in the first match of the day.

         The 132-pound weight class pitted the Eagles’ Barrett Langston against Lugoff-Elgin’s Kendell Coker. It was a hard-fought match throughout with Langston leading 5-3 going into the final of the three 2-minute periods.

         Coker got an escape early in the third period before Langston got a takedown to go up 7-4. However, Coker got an escape and a takedown early in the final minute to tie the match at 7-7 and forcing overtime.

         The first to score in overtime would be the winner, and Coker came very close to getting the takedown on Langston. Langston was able to fend it off though and got the takedown for a 9-7 victory that gave EHS a 3-0 lead.

         “It's a big momentum swing (if L-E wins that match), but we're still an underdog in some of those other matches,” Monroe said.

         The 138 match pitted Eastside’s Sam Wyland against Lugoff’s Manning Gross. While Wyland jumped out to a 6-0 lead after one period, it looked as though it would go the distance. Wyland managed to come up with a pin with 25 seconds left in the third period, and that seemed to open the floodgates for Eastside.

         The Eagles won the next three classes with first-period pins. Bronek Snizaski pinned Justin Brassell with 15 seconds left to win at 144, George Maholtz won at 150 with a pin of Gabe Rush with 11 seconds to go, and Peyton Shrader pinned Eddie Jefferson with 23 seconds left to win at 157.

         That made the score 27-0, and the rout was officially on. The pin streak was snapped at 165 as Jack Wyland won a technical fall over L-E’s Gavin Priebe by a 26-12 score after two periods.

         Wyland would get a takedown for two points, allow Priebe to score one point on an escape and then go for another takedown.

         “We felt like the kid was really trying not to get pinned,” Kosmicki said. "We were trying to pin him off of the takedown, but it just didn't present itself.”

         “I didn’t think I could pin him, so I just went with a points strategy,” said Wyland, who had 13 takedowns and allowed 12 escapes to pick up five team points that made it 32-0.

         In the 175 match, the Demons’ Logan Hinton actually took a 1-0 lead into the final period against Hank Lee. However, Lee rallied for eight points to win by decision and make it 35-0.

         L-E finally got on the scoreboard when Coleman Gross pinned Jaxon Wooten to win at 190 and make it 35-6.

         The slim hopes Lugoff had of mounting a comeback were officially ended 15 seconds into the 215 match. That’s when Baron Leonard pinned Landon Lyons to make it 41-6.

         Lugoff-Elgin’s Tyreon Taylor-Benjamin won by pin over Cliff Haynie at the 1:40 mark of the first period to make it 41-12.

         The Eagles won each of the three lightest classes by pin to increase the lead to 59-12. Nate Manos pinned Brycen Colvin at the 1:06 mark of the first period to win 106, Drayton Johnson pinned Titan McGee with 1:45 left in the second period to win 113, and Owen Salvato pinned Jonathan Ibanez with 25 seconds left in the first period to claim 120.

         The final match saw Eastside’s Kellen Smouse win an 8-3 decision over Hunter Baxley to win 126.

         Monroe pointed out that L-E wrestled without its best wrestler in Rylan Griggs, who is ranked second in 132 by scmat.com, and Quentin Benjamin, a state qualifier from last season who was out with a staph infection.

         “If you wrestle against these guys, it doesn't matter if you're 100 percent,” Monroe said. “You've got to be able to bring it. We just came up short today.

“This on paper was supposed to be a rebuilding year for us. We took some early lumps, but we turned it into something pretty special.”

Only four of the 14 wrestlers for Eastside were seniors – Jack Wyland, Wooten, Leonard and Haynie.

“We're very young so the future looks even brighter,” Kosmicki said. “We're excited about the future; I don't know if other people are.”