With recent sports shutdowns, the wrestling team persevered as they missed a few practices, matches and duals. The team pushed through and continued persevering to reach their goals for the season.

On Jan. 4, the team faced the New Castle Hurricanes and won by a long shot. Sophomore Giovanni Crivelli was able to pin his opponent within 32 seconds into the match. Freshman Gavyn McCray beat his opponent by a fluke through a technical fall over when he exceeded a certain number of points. Beating the Hurricanes 53-3, the team moved on with their next tournament.

“We are doing really good, we just made a couple mistakes but we are fixing them slowly,” McCray said.

McCray recently came back from an injury and is working to become better than ever.. The team looks back on tournaments and matches and looks at what they should work on to improve. Head Coach Ezekiel Stroupe leads the boys during practice by planning their line-ups ahead of time and looking at what they could improve upon.

“My personal goal this year is to go to states and our team has been preparing pretty well,” junior Tanner Millward said.

Freedom’s wrestling team is no stranger to State Competitions. With the records of the boys as of now, the chances of many of them going to states is an extremely high chance. With working together on improving, they work to make it there with a win.

On Jan. 8, the boys went and competed in the Ed Driscoll Mid-Atlantic Conference (MAC) Tournament. Placing sixth out of 16 different schools, the team scored a total of 86 points altogether. They went through a series of different rounds throughout the tournament. Senior Landon Millward beat his opponents through the championship quarterfinals and championship semi-finals. Landon Millward persisted through his rounds and continued to push the team toward success through each one.  

On Jan. 18, the boys faced Ambridge, Central Valley, Ellwood City and Laurel for the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL) Section 2-A Duals. Going there with high hopes, the boys left after beating three out of the four teams they competed against. The boys beat Ellwood City 42-36, Central Valley 48-24 and Ambridge 48-12, but fell to Laurel 42-33. 

The next day, on Jan. 19, the boys went onto the Fort Cherry Tri-Meet where they faced Fort Cherry and Washington school districts. They had come out with another big win, beating both Fort Cherry with 40-36 and Washington 45-24. The team ended the week with big wins and looks forward to working hard to gain some more. 

The boys will be competing again on Jan. 24, where they will face Beaver and Mars. After that, they will head to Sharon to compete in the Sharon Duals where they will face a total of 17 different schools.