The Blue Devils knocked off Northeast Macon by a 70-10 count with several of its younger wrestlers in the lineup, then used their No. 1s to take down Jordan (74-6), setting up an 11 a.m. match with the Hurricanes for the area championship.
Bremen coach Tony Armas is looking for a strong showing from his squad today heading toward the GHSA Team Dual Wrestling State Tournament next weekend at the Macon Coliseum.
“We’ll look at a few things and try to see what matchups might work to the best of our favor to try to win the dual meet and not give away anything for the area seeding,” Armas said.
Along with Bremen in the finals, Bowdon and Heard County are still alive locally and the pair will meet up at 9 a.m. in the consolation round for the right to face the Chattahoochee County/Northeast Macon winner.
Bowdon knocked off Lamar County in its first match (57-18) before falling to Spencer (48-33) and rebounding with a win over Temple (69-6), which eliminated the Tigers at the end of Friday night’s action.
“We were real happy with how we wrestled against Lamar. We bumped a few kids, with Hunter Jones bumping up a weight class and Avery [McWhorter] bumped up a weight class, and that got us off to a good start. Then we just wrestled some good, tough matches. Trevor Strickland had a good win for us against Lamar County. It was just a good, little team effort for us in that match,” Red Devil coach Craig McWhorter said.
Facing second-seeded Spencer, the Red Devils were in the match until the very end when the Greenwave pulled it out.
“I thought we really wrestled well against Spencer. It just didn’t go our way toward the end. I had a few matches that we were counting on that didn’t pan out for us, but I’m real pleased with the effort that we got. I thought we grew up a lot since last year to go up against a No. 2 seed like that. I thought we did a pretty good job,” McWhorter said. “Against Temple, they’re just struggling with numbers right now. But we’ve been there, and we understand exactly how Temple feels. So we’re happy to be coming back [Saturday].”
Armas was also pleased with the performance he got from his squad, noting that both the younger grapplers and older ones did what they needed to do on the mat.
“We got a lot of younger guys in, because you never know who’s going to have to come through at the end. Against Jordan, we basically wrestled them straight up. Not having a 220 is still killing us. But we did fine, I thought,” Armas said.
And while the winner of the Bremen/Monticello meeting will earn the area championship, there will be still be a potential battle for the second state spot, as the third-place team will get the opportunity to challenge the second-place squad — if they didn’t meet in the bracket portion of the tournament already.
“It wouldn’t be fair for a team not to be able to go because they lost to the championship team and never got to wrestle the runner-up team,” Armas said.
Consolation action begins at 9 a.m. today at Bremen High School.
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