Kelso beat Evergreen 78-0 on Wednesday in a 3A Greater St. Helens League wrestling match, yet both coaches felt like winners.
“I feel very blessed just to be out here,” Evergreen coach Tristan Munoz said. “We’ve been shut down for the last couple of weeks, and I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got back on Monday. There have been some years when we came back from break with only eight kids. This year, we had 24 back. And tonight, we were able to get all of wrestlers matches. So I feel very lucky.”
Kelso coach Bob Freund was glad to get his wrestlers back on the mat after a wasted trip to Reno – well almost to Reno – last week when the Sierra Nevada Classic was canceled by winter weather.
“We were on the road for 13 hours – and it’s a 10-hour trip – and we were still a couple of hours away, so we decided to stop for the night,” Freund said. “That’s when I got the text that the meet was canceled. So we went home the next day.”
Wrestling has been paused in Clark County for more than three weeks after a COVID-19 outbreak, so Wednesday’s meet at Evergreen was the first in the county since the pause started.
While the county lifted the pause on wrestling this week, meets scheduled at Hockinson, Prairie, Union and Fort Vancouver were postponed this week, either by COVID protocols or wrestlers weren’t ready to compete after being idle for three weeks.
“It’s been tough,” Munoz said. “I’ve been texting kids, telling them to keep up their workouts on their own and stay in shape.”
Up in Cowlitz County, the Hilanders have been able to remain active finding matches with teams in other areas of the state. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been challenges.
Besides the Reno event, Freund said he had wrestlers slated to compete at four different events on the weekend of Dec. 17-18, but three of them were canceled.
“But I was talking to (Lake Stevens coach) Brent Barnes, and he was telling me he has kids who only have wrestled two or three matches,” Freund said. “Most of my kids have 20 matches this season.”
Kelso will host its annual girls tournament this weekend, although the turnout is expected to be smaller than in past years.
“As of Monday, we had 81 teams coming with about 550 wrestlers,” Freund said. “We had 720 wrestlers two years ago. And as of today, we were down to about 450, because of COVID or out-of-district travel restrictions.”
With the postseason lingering a month away, Freund is worried about what the future might have in store for his athletes.
“We can’t shut things down,” Freund said. “We can’t take sports away from these kids. In my mind, that would be criminal. … We’ve got testing. We’ve got the tools to keep this going. It won’t necessarily be easy, but we can manage it.”
