Monday, Feb. 16, 2004 | 9:34 a.m.
By the time the consolation brackets had begun, the tone of Saturday's 4A state wrestling tournament was quite clear:
Who's second?
With Cimarron-Memorial virtually assured the team championship after qualifying six wrestlers for their respective weight class finals, and with no other school qualifying more than two, the focus shifted to where the rest of the field would place behind the eventual champion Spartans.
Fallon's Churchill County High School won the battle for runner-up, with four wrestlers finishing in third or fourth place. Carson finished third, followed by Las Vegas and Reno.
"Our kids wrestled real hard, just like we expected them to, and they performed," Cimarron coach Mike Garcia said. "At the end of the semis, we placed six in the finals ... If you win in the semis, you're guaranteed at least 12 points if you win in the semis and get into the finals."
The Spartans' Randel Aleman won at 112 pounds, Chase Pami won the 145-pound weight class, and Bobby Musser won at 152. No other school had more than one champion.
"We ended well. The kids had a good end to our season," Las Vegas coach Joe Sellers said. "We were a couple matches away from third place. A couple matches got away from us, but that's the way it goes sometimes."
But any disappointment Sellers may have had was canceled out by his excitement for his 189-pound champion, Chris Gifford. Gifford, who returned during the season from a broken leg suffered during football, won his third consecutive championship at that weight.
"I think he had a total mat time of less than three minutes," Sellers said. "It comes real natural to him, and he works so hard and is so dedicated to the sport that it's hard to match what he can do. There's not a whole lot of wrestlers in this country who can hang with him"
All coaches agreed that this year's one-day tournament made for intense competition. But the one-day affair could be a thing of the past next year.
"What bothered me is cramming it into one day. It made it kind of difficult," Garcia said. "It was a shame they had to cram it into one day. We had a coach's meeting on Friday, and they mentioned the idea of starting on Friday night next year."
Sellers said the smaller, shorter tournament made for better wrestling.
"It was a tough tournament from the get-go. You could tell after the pigtails it was going to be an exciting day," he said. "I was surprised that there weren't any weak wrestlers there. Everybody that was there was pretty tough and it made for good matches all day."
That was particularly true in the consolation brackets, where wrestlers who had been vying for a state championship had to focus on fighting for third.
"It's the hardest thing," Centennial coach Dave Juster said. "Even if they tell you they can, you know it's the hardest thing to actually do what they say. You just have to hope they're up to it and their competitive instincts will kick in."
Juster's Bulldogs had three third-place finishers, along with Angelo Antuna's championship at 135 pounds.
Other individual champions included Mojave's Keaton Blanner at 103, Green Valley's Thomas Kanski at 119, Galena's Joel Rivadeneyra at 125, Wooster's Josh Wilson at 130, Palo Verde's Tyree Walton at 140, Reno's Mike Kummer at 160, Churchill County's Darren Lewis at 171, Carson's Nick Shine at 215, and Silverado's Dominic Cammarata at 275.
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