Columbia -- Head coach Jon Rentz emphasizes conditioning and endurance with his Chesnee High School wrestling team. There’s no finer example of the Eagles’ hard work than that of the Brothers Gerstenacker.
Sophomore Thaddeus Gerstenacker at the 138-pound weight class, sophomore Quentin Gerstenacker at 144, and senior Gunther Gerstenacker at 165 all contributed to the Eagles' 39-19 victory over Buford for the AA state championship on Saturday at Dreher High School.
“They will eat metal and spit barbed wire,” Rentz said of the brothers. “They wrestle all year long and they work hard. You can see it. They’re the backbone of our team. Our kids look at them when we need to go, and they know what their job is and they motivate our team.”
The Eagles reflected the brothers’ toughness when Saturday’s match began with the 126 class. Wyatt Hawk won a 17-3 major decision over Buford’s Cohen Kennington to give Chesnee a 4-0 advantage.
Buford’s Nathan Gardner surprised Leo Delacruz with a last-second near fall for three points, good enough to win the decision 11-8 at 132. That win cut Chesnee’s lead to 4-3.
From that point the Yellow Jackets ran into the Gerstenacker brothers. First, Thaddeus at 138 pinned Holden Sistare 34 seconds into the match to give Chesnee a 10-3 lead.
Next, Quentin went the distance with Brenton Beason at 144, winning 7-1 and stretching the Eagles lead to 13-3.
Malachi Hill at 160 took Mason Deese though three periods and won 7-0, giving Chesnee a 16-3 lead.
Antonio Amos got a decision for Buford at 157 to make it 16-6, but Gunther Gerstenacker beat Samuel Nelson 14-2, earning four more points for Chesnee.
“I’m not going to pronounce their names right, but (1)38, (1)44, and (1)65, those kids are ill. They can flat wrestle,” Buford head coach Garrett Plyler said. “I know a little bit about Chesnee. I know they’re a heck of a team, they’ve got some great coaches and some jam-up (good) wrestlers, but our kids fought hard.”
After the Eagles went up 26-6 with Auston Bigford’s pin of Jakob Catoe at 175, Michael Jaimez’s pin of Vernon Roberts at 190, and Tucker Bohn’s decision over Tim Reznichenko at 215 cut Chesnee’s lead to 26-15.
That was as close as Buford could get.
Aiden Allen got the decision over Richard McKinnon at heavyweight, and Eli Barnhill’s win by forfeit at 106 gave Chesnee a 36-15 lead and all but clinched the win for the Eagles.
Isaiah Baker defeated Tevan Pesaro at 113, giving Buford its last victory of the afternoon. Ben Hefner’s 8-4 win over Mason Knight made Chesnee’s first state wrestling title official.
The victory was made even more special considering the Eagles 2011 appearance in the state final went down as a loss.
“It feels great, it feels vindicating,” Rentz said. “All those guys who wrestled back then have been watching us all year. We had lost a heartbreaker in ’11, and it took us a while to get back. I’m just so proud of our kids.”
Rentz, who also noted that Saturday was his father’s birthday and that the title is also a birthday gift for him, said Chesnee should also be proud of the crowd it brought to Dreher to pack the house.
“You saw what our community wanted. We brought a lot of people here,” he said. “I’m so proud of our community, they wanted it about as bad as we did. It’s a great community and I’m just so happy.”
While the day did not end well for Buford, Plyler said he hopes this year’s effort will drive interest in the wrestling team in the coming years.
“I hope so,” he said. “That’s what we said at the start of the season was to make this. I hope we can build off of it.”
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