Inclement weather knocked the county wrestlers out of two tournaments last week with the post-season ready to begin. James River will wrestle in the regional this Saturday and Lord Botetourt is preparing for the Blue Ridge District tournament.
River was entered in the Highlander Invitational at Glenvar last Saturday, but the Knights did not attend due to the weather. The tournament was still held, but only five teams elected to attend and the format was changed to a round robin in each weight class.
The Knights were scheduled to host a “sub-region” on Tuesday of this week with a dual team format and Appomattox, Alleghany, Glenvar and Radford participating. The Region 2C tournament is scheduled for this Saturday at Radford, but there was talk of moving it to February 12 at press time.
Lord Botetourt was planning to wrestle in the “Big Red” at Riverheads last weekend, but that tournament was cancelled. The LB backups were going to go to Glenvar but they were shut down by the school as well
“We’ve had a wild couple of weeks with the snow and cancellations,” said coach Chuck Burton. “Our kids came out a little flat against Franklin County and we got pushed around a little. We hit a good run that got started with Gray Arnold at 138 and got ourselves back in the groove. I thought we finished off the night well. We definitely finished a lot better than we started.”
The Cavs will have over two weeks without a match before starting the post-season, and that’s not ideal.
“The challenge now with a lot of lay-off time and not a lot of live action these last few weeks is to get ourselves ready for regional competition,” said Burton. “We’ve got to put in the work over the next two weeks in the practice room against each other. If we’re doing things right, we’ll peak at the right time.”