La Cañada High wrestling comes up one point short to Gabrielino
LONG BEACH — For the La Cañada High wrestling team, Saturday afternoon’s first round of the CIF Southern Section Western Division Dual Meet Championships came down to one bout and, ultimately and unfortunately, one point.
Needing four points to tie, the Spartans finished with three in the final match and lost a hard-fought 35-34 contest to Mission Valley League champion Gabrielino at Long Beach Millikan High.
PHOTOS: Spartans wrestling falls by one point to Gabrielino
The victory delivered the Eagles the program’s first-ever dual meet postseason win, while the Rio Hondo League runner-up Spartans finished 26-6 and fell short of their first playoff triumph since 2012.
“It’s just a real difficult loss and you can’t pin it on one person,” said Spartans second-year Coach Justin Luthey, whose team was defeated by West Torrance, 49-25, in last year’s Division VI first round. “I thought there were a couple of matches where we needed to get pins and didn’t get them and where we needed not to get pinned and we were pinned.
“That’s just the way it goes. We expected to win. We lost by 11 points the last time we faced Gabrielino and today it was by a point.”
The Spartans were bested, 45-34, the previous time both teams met in the Gabrielino 10-Way Duals on Dec. 13.
On Saturday, La Cañada trailed, 35-31, heading into the final bout of the day at 145 pounds.
Spartans senior Rodrigo Torres rallied from a 2-1 deficit against Gabrielino’s Van Ly to take a 3-2 lead after one round thanks to a late takedown.
After a scoreless second period, Ly tied midway through the third period at 3 due to a stalling violation versus Torres.
As the seconds wound down, the Gabrielino coaching staff implored Ly to surrender a point rather than go into a problematic extra session.
That moment came with six seconds left, when Ly allowed an escape to Torres, which gave the Spartans senior a 4-3 victory, but secured the Eagles a 35-34 win.
“I had all trust in my guy that he wouldn’t get pinned,” Gabrielino Coach Michael Humphreys said. “It’s tough to ask him to give up that point because I really thought he could have won the match, but you can’t go to overtime and risk it.
“I’ve been here for six years and this is our first-ever [CIF] win, so it feels great.”
Overall, the Spartans finished with victories in seven bouts, as did the Eagles in a match that began at 152 pounds.
La Cañada trailed, 9-6, after three weights with a pin from 160-pounder Christopher Harb at 1:45 countered by a Gabrielino fall from 152-pounder Anthony Hidalgo and a 6-2 win for Eagles 172-pounder Dillon Sullivan.
The Spartans responded to the three-point deficit with a show of strength from the upper weights, beginning with senior 182-pounder Daniel Badie, who tallied a late takedown to clinch an 8-0 major victory that gave La Cañada its first lead, 10-9.
Badie’s win was followed by pins from 195-pounder Russell Marki (50 seconds) and 220-pounder David Vardanian (37 seconds), which preceded a forfeit victory for Spartans heavyweight Stephen Naldzhyan that thrust the Spartans ahead, 28-9.
“We had a good run through the middle and upper weights and it makes losing even tougher,” Harb said. “It’s disappointing because we built a lead, but it wasn’t big enough. We needed to get the best from everybody and we just didn’t. It was anxious at the end seeing if we could hold out.”
La Cañada’s 22-point spurt was answered by a 26-0 run from the Eagles that consisted of pins from William Medellin (106 pounds), David Garcia (113) and Jael Yanes (132), a 15-0 technical fall from Harrison Sanin (126 pounds) and an 11-7 triumph from Carlos Montoya (120 pounds).
The Yanes pin gave Gabrielino a 35-28 advantage heading into the second-to-last bout.
La Cañada finally stopped the bleeding when 138-pound senior Jesse Leamon defeated Zachary Lopez, 4-2, to send both teams into a make-or-break final bout.
“For most of the team, this is the end of the season and I can’t believe it ended like this,” Badie said. “I could have done better, we could have done better, but there were some guys who just wanted to go home and now that’s what we’re doing.”
Up next for La Cañada is the CIF Southern Section Coastal Division individual championships at Lake Elsinore Lakeside High, a two-day tournament that begins Feb. 20.
The Spartans will be taking a contingent of eight grapplers, hoping to advance some to the Master’s Meet.