Bronco Wrestling

Wednesday night was Tristan's first wrestling match.

It was a duel held at Barbe High School in Lake Charles.

Barbe was wrestling Lafayette High School and when their duel was over, Sam Houston wrestled both Lafayette High and Barbe.

Tristan's match against Lafayette High was over quickly. 

In less than 40 seconds to be exact.

The guy got a hold of his leg and flipped him over and pinned him so fast.

Tristan tried to get out of it, but just did not have enough experience to hold out on him.

The boys were expecting Tristan to have a good chance with him.  Tristan was his fourth match of the night and they thought he would be tired.  I guess not!

Tristan said he was not the least bit discouraged by losing his first match.

He did not have too much time to think about it though, because he was up again in the very next match against Barbe.

Tristan against Josh.

(I heard people cheering for him.  That's how I found out his name.)

Tristan was expected to do well in this match too.

Josh had only been wrestling for one year and had not won a match yet.

I guess this was good news for Tristan, but being his first match ever, 

I expected it to be more in Josh's favor.

The boys were wrestling exhibition, so they were not scoring points for their team.

There are three periods in an exhibition match.  The first one is for one minute.

Then if there is no pin, they wrestle for two more periods, each two minutes.

Each boy wears a band around his leg.  Tristan had green and Josh had red.  The referee wears a band on each arm and raises his hand with the number of points the boy wearing that color has scored.

I found the match to be fairly humorous, for several reasons.

One, the T-Rex hands Josh has in this picture.

They are in several other shots I took and they crack me up.

Not much happened in the first minute and before I knew it the time was up.

Starting the second period.

Another reason I found the match quite funny is that Josh spent most of the time curled up in a ball waiting.

I guess that is his technique.  Stay still and tire the other guy out.

Tristan said that Josh also kept his right arm pinned underneath his right arm so that Tristan could not move.

Some of the other matches I saw were fairly physical and almost angry.  I could tell that some of the boys were getting mad at each other and they were sorta violent matches.  Tristan's matches, especially this one against Josh, was all arms, legs, and elbows flailing.  Neither one of them were very experienced wrestlers and I could not help but giggle at how funny it all looked at times.  I later told Tristan that I was sorry for laughing, but I really could not help it.

Tristan finally got Josh nearly pinned, but could never quite finish the job.

 If you look closely at the picture above, you can see that Tristan's hand is in the way of Josh's shoulder touching the mat. At the time, Tristan did not realize that he was keeping Josh's shoulder up.

And did not realize how to move his body enough to make his shoulder go down.

Josh finally wiggled enough to get free of Tristan and roll over.

Josh in a ball again, holding onto Tristan's arm. Tristan scoring two points for whatever he did to get Josh into this position.  The coaches kept yelling for Tristan to let Josh up but Tristan could not get his arm free of Josh's grasp.

I knew that there was a clock on the wall counting down the time, but I did not realize that it also showed the points.  Someone said that Tristan was about to win the match by getting the maximum amount of points allowed, which they thought was 10.  They told me that it was 9-1 and showed me the points on the clock.

I was shocked and surprised.  I do not understand the first thing about wrestling and had no idea Tristan had gotten so many points.  But the clock kept ticking as Tristan scored two more points, so they guessed the match ended at 15 instead of 10.  I did not know this, so I have no idea how many points, if any, Tristan was able to score on the boy from Lafayette.

Tristan was able to let Josh up a couple more times when they ended in a stalemate with Josh in a ball underneath Tristan, which allowed Josh to score a point each time he got away from Tristan. 

Josh scoring a point.  Towards the end of the third period, Josh got the upper hand for the first time, I think.  

There were not too many seconds left and the coaches were yelling for Tristan to stay flat on his stomach so that Josh could not go for a pin.

Tristan survived this match to win 11-5.  He was so excited to get a win in his first match.

I missed getting a picture of the referee holding his arm up for the win.  Dang it!

He had the biggest smile ever and said that he loved every minute of both matches.

He was not even all that disappointed in his quick pin in the first match.  He was just so happy to be there.

The team is in Lafayette at a tournament today, but Tristan could not go because it is also Honor Band weekend and Tristan is required to be here for that.  There is another duel next Wednesday.