Pony Boy Wrestling

Lots of scrambles this past weekend as we officially kicked off the 2024 – 2025 wrestling season. There were a few surprises and a couple things we learned here and there but over all it went about how you could have expected for a lot of our teams. There are still a significant amount of teams who don’t have their full rosters yet because of football, volleyball, and softball and of course no one is realistically in the weights they will be in January and February because of their descent plans but setting all that aside its freaking wrestling season! The best time of year by far. 

Below is a overall roundup of things that happened this past weekend that we found interesting and/or noteworthy in the great peach state. As I said earlier, several teams had split squads and sent people to different places (very smart from a coaches perspective), or they competed in a dual tournament that didn’t require it to be on Track or Flo. Either way, lets dive into the weekend roundup for 11/09/2024. 

You better take note of Jackson County Girls and Houston County Girls. Both of these teams took part in the Gainsville Girls Round Robin this past weekend and both came in firing on all cylinders. Houston County had made a case to be one of our honorable mention teams in our preseason rankings but if they keep up this dominance they will be rising in the rankings quickly. Houston County finished 3rd behind Lumpkin Co and Chestatee this past weekend in the team standings scoring 118 points with only 12 wrestlers. Good enough to finish higher than Gilmer and Gainsville, two teams we had ranked higher than them. Not a bad weekend at all for the ladies from middle georgia. 

Jackson County girls were also wrestling like their hair was on fire this weekend coming in with 23 pins this weekend which was good enough for 99.5 points. Earning the Lady Panthers 5th place, finishing just behind Gilmer and just ahead of Gainsville. Apparently these ladies from Jackson County have been working hard in the off season and preseason and don’t appreciate being overlooked in our girls preseason rankings. With such a small sample size and it being so early in the season, we are not ready to make any moves right now, but if these two teams continue to perform like this its going to be hard to keep them out of the next top ten rankings. 

Hillgrove has a ton of kids. Hillgrove brought 48 wrestlers with them to the Archer scramble this past weekend, the most of any team in attendance. Obviously if all of these kids are able to score for the overall team standings you should do better than the other teams and win the tournament. Keeping track of that many kids at a scramble is a lot of work. I’m not sure how many coaches they have in this program, but I’m willing to bet money that whoever took this group to Archer was tired as hell afterward. 

Lumpkin Girls, Camden, Ola, and Mill Creek, South Effingham, and Creekview are out here doing championship things. All of the above mentioned teams absolutely walked the dog on whoever was put in front of them this weekend. 

Lumpkin Girls brought 16 girls to the Gainsville Girls Round Robin this weekend and came home with 172 total team points, good enough for 1st place. We knew these Lumpkin girls were going to be a good team, but it wasn’t really even a close one in the team standings with the next closest team being Chestatee with 134 total points. Lumpkin finished the day with 4 champs, 1 runner up, 3 third place, 2 fourth places, and 1 fifth place finisher in the experienced division. They also brought several first year wrestlers who placed in their respective pools. One thing is for certain, these Lumpkin girls are looking really tough to beat, especially on the back half of their lineup.

Camden hosted an AAU tournament with some pretty stout competition from South Georgia and Florida. Teams all the way from Tampa Bay came to get dominated by the number 21 ranked team in the nation. From what we can tell, this was almost exclusively a Camden vs. Camden finals in almost every weight class. There were only two weight classes that Camden didn’t finish in the top 2 and in those weights they finished 3rd and 4th. They are nationally ranked for a reason, these boys can freaking go. It doesn’t matter who they put out there. If they are wearing a Camden singlet, its almost a guarantee the kid can wrestle. 

Ola took part in the Bronco Stampede this past weekend, they took the saying “there is strength in numbers” to heart and brought 42 kids to Brookwood High School. These boys (and three girls) went up there and scored 451 team points collectively. They led the tournament in every statistical category. Most pins with 59, most techs with 10, most total match points with 795, and best winning percentage with  0.611%. These boys, and girls, are looking to start this season right where they left off last year, on top. 

Mill Creek brought 13 kids to North Cobb this past weekend and brought home a first place trophy on the back of 222 total points. Harrison was the next closest team with 167 team points. The boys from Hoschton Ga went down the road to Cobb County, beat everyone up and went home. Out of the 13 wrestlers they had 5 champs, 1 second place, 4 third place, a fourth place finisher and 2 kids who couldnt quite get on the podium this weekend. The Cardinals are bringing that championship pedigree early. 

South Effingham attended the Kick off Classic Boys at Harlem High School. This was a duals tournament with pool play to start and crossover pools at the end. To say that South Effingham walked through this tournament without being challenged would be an understatement. The closest dual for these boys was a 36 point win for South Effingham, beating Habersham Central 60-24. Thirty six points was as close as anyone got to beating these boys, that’s wild. South Effinghams total combined team scores for the weekend were 326 – 61. 

Creekview took part in the Gainsville duals this past weekend and manhandled anyone they stepped on the mat with. The tournament was set up for 2 pools of 6 with a crossover match with your counterpart from the opposite pool. I’m not 100% sure on this but from 106 to about 138 for Creekview, im pretty sure those boys combined only lost 2 matches all day. The rest of the team isn’t far behind them either. Creekview didn’t take many losses at all on Saturday, and they certainly were not in any danger of taking a loss as a team. They ran through North Gwinnett, Dacula, Houston County, Gainesville, and Pope in the finals to finish the day 5-0. The closest team to them was Pope in the finals and they lost by 26. 

Where did the monsters go?!? I know that I’m old and don’t know how to navigate the world wide web like you young whippersnappers do but, the only thing I know is that some of the best teams in the state were wrestling this weekend but I don’t know where, who they wrestled against, or how they did. My staff and I can only go to so many places and then we supplement that with what we can find on the internet. Since not every tournament or dual was on the internet this past weekend its hard to track down some of these results. Below you will find a list of top teams who we couldn’t find any information on. 

Jefferson

Buford

Central Carroll (They went to Troup, but couldn’t have brought their entire team)

Colquitt County 

Rockmart

Columbus

Cass

The list goes on and on…..

If you know anything about how these teams did, then don’t be afraid to link us up with the information so we can get this information out into the world and feed these hungry wrestling fans the information we are all looking for. 

Check us out next week for another Weekly Roundup, and as always GA, STay GolDen!