PEARCY -- Lake Hamilton and Lakeside both registered wins over Greenbrier before the Wolves put on a wrestling clinic in the nightcap with a 61-17 win over the Rams at Lake Hamilton Middle School Tuesday night.
In true rivalry fashion, the matchup between the Rams and Wolves was heated from the start. Wrestlers on both sides celebrated with tons of emotion after pins, and the bleachers were packed with fans from both schools reacting to every move on the mat.
A major point of contention happened in the fourth match between the two teams when a Lakeside wrestler was picked up and slammed into the mat. Lakeside head coach H.E. Burchard had already talked to the official a few times, but this slam brought the Rams' head coach onto the center of the mat during the middle of the match.
"Ultimately his job No. 1 is to protect the kids," Burchard said. "Very rarely am I ever going to walk out on the mat because that can get me in a lot of trouble. But I've got to protect my kid, and I had to go take care of that kid. Kids are first. I talked to the official afterwards, and I told him, 'Hey, ultimately I was looking out for him.' I apologized to him for coming out onto his mat and stuff."
Burchard said the move would be a good slam at the collegiate level, but it is illegal at the high school level.
"That's a young official, and I was pretty hard on him, but he's got to protect the kids," he said. "He's just out of college. That would have been fine in a college match the way my kid went down. But with the kid going down hard like that, head was the first thing that hit the mat. I don't know if his eyes rolled or not. It didn't look really good to me."
After Lakeside won the first match of the night to take a 6-0 lead over the Wolves, Lake Hamilton registered 54 unanswered points. The Rams finally got back on the board with a 15-0 technical fall.
"I think that we came in as the underdogs, and we went to work, and we battled hard," Burchard said. "We showed some good effort. We made a few mistakes here and there that can be fixed. For the most part I didn't have any of my kids lay down, and we took it to just what was a better team tonight."
Lake Hamilton secured a tournament win at Pulaski Academy over the weekend and went into Tuesday night riding that momentum.
"We performed really well," Lake Hamilton head coach John Utley said. "We had some kids meeting our expectations. The ones we knew would do well did well. We had some young kids really do well."
Utley said the Wolves performed even better Tuesday night than they did at Pulaski Academy. However, with the postseason on the horizon, a few of Lake Hamilton's wrestlers missed out on some needed experience Tuesday.
"It would've been nice to have our lighter weights, 106, 13, 20, have matches tonight," Utley said. "Our six and 13 are young and need the matches. We had a real good weekend at Pulaski Academy. We won that tournament. We've built on that. We performed better tonight than we did at PA."
Despite the loss to Lake Hamilton, Lakeside fought hard, and the Rams proved they could compete with a strong Wolves team.
"We got a lot of momentum coming off tonight," Burchard said. "We've got a big dual next Tuesday night up in Russellville to decide whether we're going to make it to the state duals and stuff. I think we're sitting in good shape right now."
Lakeside has dealt with a lot of youth so far this season, but the young Rams are showing signs of improvement.
"I've got a lot of freshmen and sophomores that are working hard that are going to be successful wrestlers," Burchard said. "I've only got a couple seniors, and one of them is No. 1 in the state. He hasn't even been touched yet. I think we're OK. We're young, but we're growing every day, and that's the key."
The win over Lakeside was even sweeter for Lake Hamilton considering the history and rivalry between the two schools.
"This is our fifth year," Utley said. "The first year we went over to Lakeside, and they roughed us up pretty good. We got a little better the next year and then the next year. So now we're kind of getting the upper hand a little bit. Lakeside is still good. ... They've got some good wrestlers, but our kids have stepped up, and we knew we were going to have to."