Your future, our focus
The Trappers finished one up and one down Friday in back-to-back duals on the road at Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, Colorado.
Coach Jim Zeigler’s squad beat Cloud County Kansas for the one up. The one down came in a loss to host Northeastern.
What will be memorable about the trip — for all the wrong reasons — were mindless hours stuck on board the bus.
After leaving Powell on Thursday it was 10-plus bun-numbing hours before finally arriving in Sterling late that night. Weigh-ins were Friday at 7 a.m. and the Cloud County Thunderbirds awaited at 10.
The Trappers regained enough sensation in their extremities to win seven of the eight matches that went to the mat and win 33-21. Northwest forfeited to Cloud County at 152 and 285 pounds, where the team has no one to send out. That will continue to be the case the remainder of the season, Zeigler said.
Pins were recorded for Northwest by Dawson Barfuss (125), Van Bray (141), Brady Lowry (157) and Jate Frost (165). Porter Fox earned major decision points for the Trappers at 174.
As quickly as that dual was in the books, after a break of perhaps 15 minutes, the Trappers faced the host Plainsmen of Northeastern Junior College. That one went to NJC by a count of 41-9.
Bray took a hard-fought, sudden-victory overtime win 6-5 at 141. The other six Trapper points came at 197, where Majid Muratov pinned Plainsman Austin Kelchen in 6:39.
The Trappers didn’t have their A game versus NJC and it showed in the final score.
Zeigler said his men “ran out of gas,” likely due at least in part to the seemingly endless ride to Sterling.
What the contingent from NWC didn’t know, however, was that the worst was still to come.
“We got on the bus to travel home,” Zeigler said, but “there were such high winds on I-80” that the driver — who did a marvelous job by the team’s account — had no option but to ricochet home via a number of alternate routes.
Even that didn’t work: Wind warnings were so dire that the troupe spent Friday night holed up in Casper.
On Saturday, they got as far as Meeteetse where the bus broke down, if you can believe that one. After a couple hours treading water while a belt was rounded up and installed on the motor, Zeigler and his young charges — plus the equally long-suffering driver — finally reached Powell city limits at 2:30 p.m. Saturday.
“It’s just exhausting to be on a bus that long,” said the coach who, with a bit of quick addition, calculated the Trappers spent almost 24 hours jiggling up, down, round and round on their incredible, forgettable journey.