The Mens Junior Freestyle National Duals team began their tournament yesterday. The National Duals tournament is always a highlight of the summer, 39 teams representing 29 states have all come to the Cox Convention Center in Tulsa Oklahoma in the hopes of becoming the best Freestyle team in the nation.
Typically this would be the point where we would go over how the tournament is organized and how Team Georgia is projected to do within their original pool and the subsequent placement pools after that. Instead of that we are going to take a different approach.
For the past decade Georgia wrestling has clawed its way out of the cellar on the national level developing nationally ranked guys through the club and high school ranks. We saw unprecedented success at the collegiate level for the first time with our first ever male and female national champion with Caleb Henson and Amani Jones. On the brink of becoming a respected and possibly feared wrestling state we go out to Oklahoma for national duals and lay an absolute egg on the national stage.
Lets look at the stats, the team went 2-6 overall for both days of competition. We finished 8th in Pool C, 6th in the yellow/green pool and finished 30th out of 39 teams. We lost to Oklahoma, Minnesota, California, and Ohios 1st and 2nd teams. Our average margin on loss was 23.66 points, meaning we were never really in any of the duals that we lost. When the most team points you can get in freestyle is 5 during a dual, that means we lost by 4 pins and a decision, on average, to every team we faced with the exception of Arkansas Blue and Louisiana Blue.
I would like to make this perfectly clear, I am in no way embarrassed by the wrestlers who were on this team. There are some kids on this team that are absolute monsters, there are others who are not though. These Georgia wrestlers went out for every dual, competed hard, won and lost the right way and represented our state to the absolute best of their ability. But, in no way was this the best team that Georgia could have assembled to go and represent us.
Where were the best kids in Georgia? Where was Bambinelli, Paradise, Shafer, Crapps, Levy, Wilder, the list goes on and on. Why do other states take the national duals seriously and their athletes want to go out and represent their states and it seems like Georgia doesn’t care. This is not the only year it has felt like this. Georgia never seems to be able to get our best kids, for the mens teams, to compete and represent us. I firmly believe that we could have sent one of our elite high school teams up there like Camden and/or Social Circle and they would have done better than Team Georgia this year.
To end this rant on a positive note Cade Parent, Marley Washington,Ian, Stephens, Keiron McCormack, Gabriel Burns, Jack Godbee, and Connor McCloskey all had decent weekends that should be noted.
If you would like to see the brackets for this disaster of a tournament you can click here.
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