Cougar boys, Storm girls win in Conrad

CONRAD – AGWSR boys wrestling capitalized on four wins by forfeit in a 60-15 victory over South Hardin-BCLUW to end a Thursday triangular at BCLUW High School.

Ben Puente, Aiden Heitland, Jariyah Bowles, Noah Clikeman and Bo Gerbracht all went 2-0 on Thursday for the Cougars.

Cougar head coach Chad Gerbracht thought the boys bounced back decently from a 44-33 loss to Denver in the first dual of the night. The Cyclones went on to win the night with a 57-22 triumph against the Storm.

“That first dual wasn’t our best stuff,” Gerbracht said. “I don’t think our focus was great. On the way here, in-between duals, I don’t think our focus was where it needed to be but those are things that we can get back on track. Tonight’s just one day on the calendar.”

While Gerbracht saw bright spots at times during the duals, he hopes the Cougars can pick up where they left off after a solid end to the 2022 schedule.

“Just improve that one percent each time out and stop making the silly mistakes,” Gerbracht continued. “That one move that might work against the lower-end kid, we have to find the moves that are going to work against the upper-end kids. … We did a better job on top tonight than we have in the past. But it’s January and we’re going to get a lot of wrestling here in a short period of time.”

The signature win for the Storm boys on Thursday may well have been Sean May toppling AGWSR’s ranked heavyweight Tate Miller, rated eighth in 1A by IAwrestle.

May controlled their match on Thursday and ended it with a first-period fall.

“Him and Coach Groeneveld have been battling in the room and he’s just been beating on Groeneveld pretty good,” Miller said. “I hadn’t wrestled him in about two weeks and he came in on Tuesday and just walloped on me. And I thought, ‘this kid’s turned a corner. … He’s going to be the real deal now.’

“He recognized the position he was in and attacked right away. He set the tone and just went to work. He’s very tough on top.”

May and Zaden Eggers were the two Storm wrestlers that went 2-0 on Thursday.

“Zaden’s been doing really good,” Miller said, “We’ve got Walker Ashton down to the weight we want him to, Ryan’s looking pretty good at the weight that we want him at now.”

The Storm is moving forward after losing a couple wrestlers that left the program over the break.

“We can’t look in the rear-view mirror,” Miller said. “As this month winds down, we need to start getting prepared for districts.”

In girls action, the Storm defeated AGWSR 30-12 in a dual that only had three contested matches - Leila Wedgwood and Kailan McEwen won for the Storm by pinfall; and AGWSR’s Trinity Rotgers scored a win by fall.