Scott Swanson
For three Sweet Home seniors, Saturday night’s 4A state wrestling finals matches were a chance to take care of some unfinished business.
Colton Schilling, Tyler Cowger and Wade Paulus had all been there before – last year, to be exact, when each lost to finish second.
This year was different – from the very start, they said. And
Colton Schilling, left, Wade Paulus, middle,
celebrating with Coach Steve Thorpe, and Tyler
Cowger, right, all won state wrestling
championships Saturday at the OSAA 4A state
meet at Memorial Coliseum in Portland. Sweet
Home finished third in the team scoring
it ended differently, as all three won state titles, the most individual winners Coach Steve Thorpe has had in his 16 years at the helm for the Huskies.
“Man, I really worked for that,” Cowger said after outscoring Cascade’s Spencer Crawford 5-1 to win the 152-pound title, after finishing second the two previous years. “I don’t have any emotion to describe what I’m feeling right now. A lot of hard work went into that one.”
Paulus, who won the 195-pound title with a pin of Crook County’s Gunner Crawford in what Thorpe said was the quickest finals match he has ever coached – 45 seconds, said his loss last year was a “huge disappointment.”
“I used that loss to motivate me,” he said. “I came out this year just a completely different wrestler than I was last year.”
The Huskies placed third as a team with 161 points, behind champion Crook County, which qualified 21 wrestlers for state and finished with 290 points, and Henley (196). Cascade was fourth with 161.
The Huskies finished with seven place-winners out of 13 wrestlers, and 11 scorers. Tyler Schilling was third in the very competitive 106-pound division and Zach Gill finished third at 285 – for the second year in a row. Justin Nicholson placed fourth at 113 pounds and Trever Olson was sixth at 145.
“It was a good end of the season,” said Coach Steve Thorpe, for whom this is the seventh straight team trophy (top four) the Huskies have won. “We won 41 duals. We placed at tournaments and we won a trophy again. I’m as proud of this third as I would be if it was a first.”
For Colton Schilling, who won state titles as a freshman and sophomore before losing in last year’s 120-pound finals to Henley’s Ronny Bresser, this year was revenge time – as he faced Bresser’s younger brother Zech, winner of the 113-pound title last year, in the 132-pound final.
His loss to Ronny Bresser last year came in frustrating fashion as Bresser, who won the 120-pound championship again this year, used his extreme quickness to score a couple of early takedowns and then spent the rest of the match avoiding Schilling’s attacks.
This time Schilling was ready, as he expected more of the same from Zech Bresser. He stayed low to the mat to thwart Bresser’s leg takedown attempts, and attacked aggressively from the opening whistle.
After a scoreless first period, Bresser received a stalling warning and let Schilling go from the referee’s position, giving Schilling a 1-0 lead. scored on an escape in the second period and then Bresser scored what scorers initially credited as a takedown on a single-leg attempt, but that was removed as they went into third period. The third period began with Bresser sitting down to take some injury time that appeared to be a breather.
Less than a minute in, the referee awarded Schilling two points on a technical violation and then Bresser got called for stalling and then Schilling scored a quick takedown to make it 4-0 with a minute to go. With two seconds to go, Schilling took Bresser down one more time to ice the match, 6-0.
“There was definitely some revenge, grudge match, going on there,” said Schilling, who has signed to wrestled at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “Last year, losing to Ronny, gave me an extra push today.
“I knew I had to come out fast and hard and explosive, I knew I had a lot more gas in the tank than he did, so I was pushing the whole first round. That was my goal, to make it so he couldn’t keep up with me.”
Schilling said he just concentrated on being himself.
“Last year I was worried about how Ronny Bresser wrestled and how I should match that,” he said. “This year I just tried to keep my composure and wrestle like Colton Schilling and don’t get caught up in what Henley’s doing, what Zech Bresser is doing on the mat.”
Cowger’s final was less dramatic, having swept Crawford three times – all shut-outs – earlier, including a 5-0 win at districts a week earlier.
“I went in there knowing I’d beat that guy three times this year, but I still approached it like it was the first time we’d ever wrestled,” he said.
Having finished as a runner-up twice, the first time in double overtime, Cowger admitted he’d struggled with some doubts.
“I hadn’t won a high school tournament in two years until last weekend (at districts),” he said. “There was a lot of doubt in my mind. I finally broke the curse.”
Paulus wasted no time getting down to business against Crawford, whom he’d beaten twice before, at the Oregon Classic and in a dual meet in Lebanon, this year. He said he made an attitude adjustment after his loss last year in the finals.
“Instead of ‘What if I lose?’ this time it was ‘He’s not going to (beat me),’” Paulus said. “I learned from last year – you’ve got to be aggressive and you can’t let the crowd get to you. The nerves, they really bog you down. This year I’m used to it. I’ve been there before and it helped.”
After attempting a takedown 30 seconds in that the referee ruled was out of bounds, Paulus caught Crawford in a perfect head-and-arm throw and had him pinned within seconds.
“Right off the whistle, I could feel that he wasn’t going to be aggressive,” Paulus said. “Something clicked in my mind –’Just get mean with him.’ I just went in and attacked and it was there. That’s my bread and butter, the old throws. When I got him on his back, there’s no way he’s getting out.”
The third-place finish came after the Huskies had to deal with some adversity, particularly Nicholson and Olson.
Nicholson was cruising toward the final in the 113-pound division when he essentially was beaten by the officiating in his semifinal match against Henley’s Quinton Hook.
The referee called what spectators remembered as at least eight cautions during the match on restarts and stopped the match without blowing his whistle after Nicholson had apparently scored a takedown on Hook. That appeared to take the wind out of Nicholson’s sails and he got caught in a takedown and near-fall by Hook, who has a defensive wrestling style, and was forced to play catch-up the rest of the match, losing 9-8.
“One bad call and I could be in the finals right now,” he said after his fourth-place finish, a 5-1 loss to Cascade’s Logan Humphrey.
“We’ve been even all year,” he said of Humphrey, whom he beat to win the district title a week before. He attributed the loss to “being sore, tired and feeling bad for myself.
“I figured I was going to beat him. I was leading him the whole match until I took one bad shot and that turned the whole match around and he got me on my back. That changed the whole outcome of the match. I had to play catch-up the rest of the match.
“I really expected to make it into the finals.”
Thorpe noted that the referee was taken out of the tournament after that match.
“When the officiating is that bad, that a guy is removed from the tournament, the bad thing is it cost Justin the match,” he said. “But I don’t want to take anything away from his opponent. The Hook kid wrestled very hard. Those are just two kids who wrestled very hard. Too bad it ended like that.
“But Justin gets a win, then places fourth in this tournament. I’m proud of him.”
Olson lost his third match to No. 2 seed Cole Hannan, who finished second to North Marion’s Lucas Randall. Then, in his first consolation match, he broke his nose as he wrestled Jacob Davidson of Estacada, losing 2-1 in overtime, and then lost 6-3 to Dawson Barber of Crook County in matches that had to be repeatedly stopped to attend to his bleeding nose. Thorpe eventually told trainers to tape Olson’s face to keep the nose from bleeding and deal with other injuries, including a torn labrum in Olson’s shoulder that forced one stoppage.
“What do you say about Trever Olson?” he asked. “You’ve got a broken nose, an injured hip, an injured shoulder. And you compete. And you give everything you’ve got.
HEAVILY BANDAGED, Trever Olson scrambles for an escape as Crook County’s Dawson Barber tries to hold on.
“I’d love to say he wrestled poorly. He just lost. He got beat. He showed the kind of person he is with how he competed. I’m very proud of how Trever did not make excuses. He just wrestled his guts out the whole time.”
Olson was unhappy with his finish, he said, though he acknowledged that the injuries had an effect.
“I don’t want to say it did, but it probably did little a bit,” he said. “It’s tough. That wasn’t my goal. I was so close to making finals.
“I was worried about my legacy, what I leave behind. I just wanted to leave a legacy that the young kids could look up to. So I wrestled as hard as I could.”
Sophomore Tyler Schilling, who won a single match last year, finished third in the very competitive 106-pound division after falling 15-2 in the second round to Banks’ Colin Purinton, the eventual winner.
After that loss, though, Schilling powered his way through the consolation bracket Friday and Saturday.
“Once I lost, third place was my new first,” he said. “I got my new first. I wanted to be in the finals, but that’s all right. After I lost my first match, I just went crazy. I didn’t even think about it. I just went out and wrestled – the best I think I’ve wrestled all year.”
TYLER SCHILLING thwarts an escape attempt by Ontario’s Francisco Berrera.
Schilling beat Scappoose’s Kurt Mode 8-6 for the consolation title.
“The only guy he lost to in the tournament is the state champion, a kid he’s been wrestling since they were little kids,” Thorpe said. “He had to win some very close matches, hard-fought maches. Tyler Schilling has done everything in the off-season to put himself where he is here. Being an All-American, wrestling tournaments, training, doing extra work. That is helpful.”
In the heavyweight 285-pound division, Gill lost his second match on Friday, a 5-2 decision, to No. 1 seed Gabriel Gonzalez of Ontario, but fought his way through the consolation bracket to face Gonzalez again in the consolation final, where he pinned Gonzalez, placing third for the second straight year.
“What I did was basically an all-for-nothing lateral drop,” Gill said. “(Coach Tim) Boatright taught me something for emergencies and this was an emergency.
ZACH GILL prepares to pin Brennan Patterson of North Marion.
I needed to do something. I didn’t even practice it all that “much”.
He said Gonzalez was smaller and quicker, which is why Gill had trouble with him in the first match.
He said Gonzalez was smaller and quicker, which is why Gill had trouble with him in the first match.
“I knew I had a shot,” Gill said. “It was desperate times. I knew I had to do something.”
Thorpe noted that Gill battled through some adversity too to get that third place.
“He beat a kid that had pinned him, at the (Oregon) Classic, in his first match. Then he lost. But he came back and he scored points and scored falls.
“Three for three in the finals is a good number. Kind of putting a stamp on that with Wade getting a fall, that was really neat – really neat. But you take a look at those three guys who all won, they won by being offensive wrestlers, by taking the match to that guy. When you do that, you create opportunities for yourself to be successful.
“It has been a good season. The only team that’s trophying here that we haven’t beat this year is Crook County – and Hermiston (which won the 5A title). We wrestled everybody at Tournament of Champions, at the Classic, at various tournaments. This is a good cap run.
“I’m proud of Sweet Home wrestling – not just the three guys who won state titles.”
Thorpe said he hoped this year’s success would be a lesson to the upcoming generation.
He said he was “proud” of Gill’s performance for that reason.
“It’s a good way for him to go out as a senior with a win. I hope that some younger guys can see that.”
The next generation was on the minds of others as well.
Cowger, who said he was planning to take “a week off” and visit some colleges before training for the nationals this summer in Fargo, N.D., said he was determined this year to do what it took to win.
“In the past, I always took breaks,” he said. “I slacked off in practice, in schoolwork, in morning workouts. This year I just put my nose to the grindstone and worked my butt off every day.”
Those efforts included daily morning runs with Schilling and workouts with Assistant Coach Tomas Rosa, who wrestled for five years at Southern Oregon.
“He was getting me prepared every single day,” Cowger said.
He called the third-place finish “a little disappointing” and called out future Huskies to put in the effort necessary to win.
“A lot of guys folded at regionals that we could have used here, just to plain score some points,” he said. “I love my team. At the end of the day, though, it all comes down to who works harder and doesn’t take breaks. We have a few guys on our team who need to learn to take less breaks.
“It’s dedication that wins matches.”
OSAA 4A Wrestling
State Championships
Top 10 Team Scores – (1) Crook County 290; (2) Henley 196; (3) Sweet Home 161; (4) Cascade 126; (5) Tillamook 104; (6) Scappoose 78.5; (7) Klamath Union 76; (8) Estacada 59; (9) McLoughlin 53; (10) North Marion 48.
Sweet Home Individual Results
106 – Tyler Schilling (SH) dec. Cole Rohan (La Grande) 9-5; lost by major dec. to eventual champion Collin Purinton (Banks) 15-2; in consolation bracket, dec. Trevon Kylman (Henley) 11-0; dec. Francisco Barrera (Ontario) 2-1; pinned no. 3-seed Chris Bowers (South Umpqua) 2:39; dec. Kurt Mode (Scappoose) 8-6 to finish third.
106 – Tyrel Miller (SH) lost by fall to No. 1 Seed Trayton Libolt (Crook County) 2:38; in consolation bracket, lost 10-4 to Joe Britt (Henley); did not place.
113 – Justin Nicholson (SH) dec. Samuel Flores (Madras) 10-1; pinned Luke Valle (North Valley) 5:16; lost 9-8 to Quinton Hook (Henley); in consolation bracket, dec. Blake McNall (Gladstone) 5-2; lost 5-1 to Logan Humphrey (Cascade) to place fourth.
120 – Anthony Hardee (SH) lost 12-4 to No. 2 Seed Donny Wenlund (Estacada); in consolation bracket dec. Knute Thompson (Phoenix) 15-3; lost 9-6 to No. 3 Seed Josh Connor (Newport); did not place.
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