High School Wrestling

Howard's wrestling team hopes to contend for the county title with a mix of veterans in the middle weights and rookies in the lighter weights.Coach Fred Bullock, who begins his third season, is counting on the experience of seniors Mark Grinspoon, Ed Weeks, Jason Shefrin and John Wiland and junior Seth Eldridge to carry the Lions.Howard had one of its best turnouts in recent years with 32 candidates."This is the best turnout numbers-wise and quality-wise in the 12 years I've been athletic director," said Vince Parnell, who also serves as the Lions' assistant wrestling coach.

When the 2011-12 high school wrestling season rolls around, coaches are going to have to cope with a number of changes, including major modifications to one of the most basic rules — weight class designations. Officials at the National Federation of State High School Associations Board of Directors calls it the "most significant changes" to high school wrestling weight classes in 23 years. The NFHS Board approved an upward shift in weights. There will no longer be a 103-pound class.

To coach Ron McMillan, a healthy Atholton team that shows steady progress on the wrestling mat translates into a .500 team.That's 50 percent better than last season, when the Raiders, after forfeiting four or five weight classes per match, finished 0-13.This year, McMillan, a third-year coach, has more room for optimism.Despite an inexperienced roster, every weight class will be filled. In addition, McMillan laid a solid foundation for the future, luring at least 10 junior varsity football players to wrestle, mostly at the same level.

Writer-director Tom McCarthy says that when he began working on "Win Win," the hook for him was high-school wrestling. "I thought — 'Wow! What an interesting thing to explore.' I wondered, if I was to expand from there with a story, where would it lead?" McCarthy didn't want to make another rah-rah sports film. Barack Obama had just been elected president. Everywhere people were speaking about restoring the American Dream. "We were hearing a lot about the middle class," McCarthy says.

MOTHERS, DON'T let your babies grow up to be wrestlers. Trust me. You'll hate it. The only activity our sons could choose that would be less mother-friendly is patrolling sniper zones in the Balkans. Wrestling is as close to hand-to-hand combat as your baby boy can get without carrying a knife between his teeth. There is no place for mothers in wrestling. "I watch through my fingers," one wrestling mother told me. "I am afraid to be here in case something happens. But I am afraid not to be here in case something happens.

COLLEGE PARK -- If you don't follow high school wrestling in Maryland, you might be surprised to learn that the most interesting story line at yesterday's state tournament didn't involve a defending champion or a three-team race for the overall title. Instead, it involved a wrestler dressed in pink socks, lime-green headgear and sporting a ponytail who finished second in the final of the Class 4A-3A 103-pound weight class. More wrestling Old Mill captures its eighth state tournament title; Asper becomes Hereford's first three-time state champ.

Ron Muir has an angry past.He blames his "short fuse" for the premature end to an otherwise solid high school wrestling career, his failure to graduate from Glen Burnie and the deterioration of his relationship with his parents.His best grades came during a freshman year at Marley Junior Highin which he was a B student and a county wrestling champion. Over the next three years, however, social workers and counselors were his constant companions.Once, during his junior year, he was arrested for having a fight with his father.

Westminster wrestling coach Solomon Carr still remembers returning home after competing in his first official wrestling tournament.He was in the second grade at the time and ended up going against a cousin who was in the fourth grade.He said he got "crushed," and when he got home, all of his brothers and sisters made him do extra chores for losing."I wanted to get out of wrestling then and there. They gave me no slack at all," Carr said.He did, but only until the fifth grade. When you're a Carr brother in Erie, Pa., it's almost a given you are going to wrestle and wrestle well.

A Montgomery County Circuit Court judge denied yesterday the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association's move to block a lawsuit seeking another upper-weight class for public high school wrestling.Attorney Robin Ficker, who sued in September, said Judge James Chapin also scheduled four days beginning Jan. 10 to hear arguments, after which he will rule on whether a 215-pound weight class should be created. The state's heaviest classifications are 189 pounds and unlimited (a maximum of 275 pounds)

RECENTLY I wrapped up the "I am the dad of a high school wrestler" stage of my life. Like most matters connected with high school wrestling, my goodbye was intense and long-lasting. It stretched over three weekends. First there was a conference tournament, a spirited two-day affair held at Mount St. Joseph in West Baltimore. Next there was a state tournament, an even noisier two-day drama held at McDonogh in Owings Mills. Then there was the National Prep School Wrestling Championships held last weekend at Lehigh University outside Allentown, Pa. This was an eight-mat extravaganza that lasted either three days or an eternity, depending on how your back felt after you had been sitting in the stands.

Charges against a former two-time high school state wrestling champion were dropped Friday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court because of what prosecutors called inconsistencies in the victim's statement. The charges — second-degree assault, robbery, reckless endangerment and theft — stemmed from an incident in September in which Patrick Downey III of Glen Burnie and two others were accused by a fellow North County High School student of not paying for a small bag of marijuana and then driving away while the 16-year-old victim was attempting to get back in the car. In asking Judge Paul A. Hackner to drop the charges against Downey, Assistant State's Attorney Brooke McKay said the 16-year-old told "numerous versions" of his story to police and prosecutors.

A Baltimore judge has postponed the trial of two former state high school wrestling champions from Anne Arundel County who were charged last June with assaulting a pair of Navy football players at an 18-and-over city club. At a hearing Monday in Baltimore Circuit Court, the attorney for James Patrick Downey III of Linthicum Heights, said his client wasn't ready to go to trial. The prosecutor, meanwhile, asked to have Downey — who also faces two other assault charges — and Louis Patrick Carey tried together.

I "ran across" Lloyd Keaser on Sunday, but not, thank God, in the way Irv Johnson "ran across" Keaser 40 years ago. The school year 1967-1968 found me having some way bungled my way onto City College's wrestling team. I didn't make the team because of talent. I made it because, obviously, City head wrestling coach Clark Hudak lowered his standards considerably. I was 135 pounds of distinctly non-athletic skin and bones, which allowed me to compete in the 127- and 133-pound weight classes.

COLLEGE PARK -- If you don't follow high school wrestling in Maryland, you might be surprised to learn that the most interesting story line at yesterday's state tournament didn't involve a defending champion or a three-team race for the overall title. Instead, it involved a wrestler dressed in pink socks, lime-green headgear and sporting a ponytail who finished second in the final of the Class 4A-3A 103-pound weight class. More wrestling Old Mill captures its eighth state tournament title; Asper becomes Hereford's first three-time state champ.

The No. 4 Hammond wrestling team captured the Class 2A-1A South region dual meet at home last night by handling two Howard County foes - Glenelg by a 38-27 count in the semifinals followed by a 36-32 win over Oakland Mills in the final. The Golden Bears pinned their way past Oakland Mills to secure a trip to Saturday's state dual-meet championships, to be hosted by Thomas Johnson High in Frederick County. Hammond goes in as defending state dual-meet champion. Justin Harding got the final started at the 215-pound class, decking Mike Santiago in 48 seconds for his second pin of the night.

103 -- 1. Rob Eloshway, Atholton (13-0); 2. Eric Filipowicz, McDonogh (14-4); 3. Nik Gialamis, Calvert Hall (11-2); 4. Austen Clouse, Mount St. Joseph (8-7); 5. Jeremy Seipp, North Carroll (11-2); 6. Tyler Bulger, Howard (7-2). 112 -- 1. Greg Saumenig, Old Mill (9-0); 2. Josh Fitch, McDonogh (7-2); 3. Tyler Scarinzi, Archbishop Curley (16-1); 4. Devon Gillett, Hammond (11-1); 5. Jared Bosque, Chesapeake-AA (9-2); 6. Mark Taylor, Harford Tech (14-2). 119 -- 1. Danny Whitenak, Mount St. Joseph (7-7)

FOR THE PAST 25 years, Jerome Featherstone Sr. was known to local high school wrestling aficionados as "the only guy to beat Rico." Rico is Rico Chiaparelli, perhaps the greatest wrestler to come out of the Baltimore area's greatest high school wrestling program: Mount St. Joseph. Chiaparelli went on to finish fifth, fourth and then first in the NCAA championships during his three years as a varsity starter at the University of Iowa. Featherstone's life took a different path: three years in the Marines, a marriage of 19 years, three children, and coach of the McKim Center junior league wrestling team, where he steered perhaps dozens of black boys away from the clarion call of the streets.

IT'S FUNNY how acting on a whim can take you back 35 years. I was recovering from a nasty virus my grandchildren -- Senor Spences and his kid sister and partner in contagion, Kaila -- had passed on to me nearly two weeks earlier. (They recovered sooner, proving that their little bodies are made for regeneration and rejuvenation and granddad's is made for the couch.) It was the Saturday before the Super Bowl. I trolled the papers, antsy to get out, afflicted with borderline cabin fever and looking to take in some wrestling because the virus had caused me to miss the Hammond tournament a week earlier.

NEWARK, Del. -- The Beast of the East, the nation's most prestigious high school wrestling invitational, isn't a nurturing event. Its brutal, 64-wrestler weight classes provide few, if any, easy matches. Its standout wrestlers, many from the mill towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio, grapple in a physical style unseen in Maryland. To place here at the University of Delaware is quite an accomplishment. For Baltimore's two most accomplished wrestlers - Mount St. Joseph's Mack Lewnes, a three-time state champion, and McDonogh's Bryn Holmes, a two-time state champion - this grueling event proved a physical and emotional test with some successes and some setbacks.

The Class 4A-3A division of last weekend's Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association state high school wrestling tournament had a distinct Anne Arundel County feel to it. Arundel High finished fourth in team points, with Chesapeake seventh, Old Mill ninth and South River 11th. In addition, two Anne Arundel County wrestlers won state championships, and four others were runners-up. That's not unusual for the state tournament, in which Anne Arundel schools have long fared well.