Montezuma-Cortez High School placed two top-five wrestlers at the 35-team Warrior Classic at Grand Junction Central High School on Friday and Saturday.
The individual tournament format included some of the Wests best grapplers. Panthers coach Eric Smith feels the Warrior Classic greatly prepared his team for the rest of the season.
Its a good measuring stick to see how their going to stack up at state. The boys get pretty excited about it, he said. Its early in the season, but the boys work hard for it. Its good to see what their mind set is going in to a big tournament. Youre dealing with all classifications of wrestlers. To come out of there and place, is pretty good. This is by far the biggest tournament well have this year.
Junior Ryan Daves took fifth at 126 pounds with a 4-2 record. Last years state qualifier dropped down from 132 pounds.
Senior Trenton Gustafson also finished fifth at 182 pounds, going 5-2 at the tournament.
Freshman Segar Oliver posted a 3-2 mark at 152 pounds, moving up from 145.
Levi Gross went 2-2 at 113 pounds.
Justice Ramos and Shelton Little were both 0-2 at 132 and 138 pounds.
The Panthers are off for Christmas break and will wrestle again on Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012 at the Montrose High School tournament at 9 a.m.
The last week and a half, weve been fighting some illness and some injuries, Smith said. Now, we get two and half weeks to basically heal up and get healthy again. Hopefully, we get the bugs out now, and finish up the season healthy and strong. Well just focus on some technique now and work a little bit harder on our conditioning.