FORGET ABOUT THE finals.
The biggest pressure cooker at the Mat Classic comes a round earlier.
As any North Olympic Peninsula high school wrestling coach will tell you, winning the semifinal match is as difficult as it gets inside the Tacoma Dome.
“It’s a mental hurdle, no doubt about it,” said Port Angeles coach Erik Gonzalez. “There’s not a whole lot of room for error.
“When you get to the semis, you make one mistake and that could be it. Everyone wants to get to the finals, and everyone is tight because of it.”
It’s certainly hard to argue with the premise.
The Peninsula has gone a combined 8-19 in that round during the last 11 years, as compared to its 6-2 mark in the finals.
Saturday afternoon’s results backed that up even more, as all three of the area’s semifinalists — Port Angeles’ Adam Raemer, Port Townsend’s Brett Johnson and Forks’ Cutter Grahn — went down.
Raemer’s triple overtime loss to Hamilton Noel of Liberty (Issaquah) illustrated the fine line between the finals and consolation bracket better than any.
The Port Angeles senior took a 3-1 lead early in the third round and was a little more than a minute from victory.
Holding on for dear life, however, Raemer was penalized a point for stalling on two different occasions to tie the score at three and send it to overtime.
After failing to escape Noel’s grasp in the second overtime, Raemer was reversed in the final moments of the third extra frame for a 5-3 loss.
“I thought I should be in the finals,” Raemer said. “It’s very difficult [to take].
“It’s not like he beat me, it’s like the refs beat me for him. I don’t feel very good about it at all, but it happened.”
Said Gonzalez, “You can’t let it come down to a referee’s call. The reality is, we didn’t get the job done.”
Controversial calls aside, nerves likely played a part in the loss as well.
No doubt they were present in Johnson’s 14-4 loss to Cashmere’s Roman Velazquez.
Like Raemer, Johnson held a lead at one point in the Class 1A 160-pound match, going ahead 4-3 in the second round.
Yet with his energy seemingly drained, and the pressure mounting after going down 5-4 with two minutes to go, Johnson surrendered eight points in the third period to lose going away.
“I just didn’t feel 100 percent,” Johnson said. “I felt like a slug.”
In Johnson’s case, something as small as the morning’s pregame meal — cereal and orange juice Saturday morning — may very well have been the difference between an energized wrestler and one stuck in the mud.
Not to mention one who’s going on to the finals.
“You think you’re doing all the right things, and all of the sudden you’re seeing something going south, and you can’t do anything about it,” said Joey Johnson, Brett’s coach and father.
“That [championship] medal takes a fine line. You think you got it, and then all of the sudden, it’s oops, we went too far.”
Brett Johnson and Raemer each lost in the semifinals for the second straight year.
Grahn, on the other hand, was a semis newbie.
And while he did have an early takedown opportunity, he was dispatched with relative ease 8-0 by the eventual 1A champion at 112 pounds, Sam Chapman of Vashon Island.
“Cutter didn’t do anything wrong,” Forks coach Bob Wheeler said. “The other kid just did a lot of things right.”
That’s the other thing about the semis: Everyone there is used to winning, and winning a lot.
“You talk about pressure at the state tournament anyway, and then it’s the semifinals and a lot of the guys have been looking forward to getting to the finals [all year],” Wheeler said.
“Everyone thinks they are capable of doing it, and it’s just the pressure of that.”
Consolation thoughts
If the semis are the toughest, then the consolation match after losing there has to be No. 2.
The wrestler has less than an hour to deal with the reality of falling one win short of the finals.
Then, they have a motivated opponent fresh off a victory coming at them.
Not surprisingly, two of the three semifinal losers from the Peninsula on Saturday (Grahn and Raemer) ended up losing that next match as well.
That’s exactly what makes Johnson’s back-to-back convincing victories in the next two rounds so special.
“You come back from disappointments like that, it says a lot about his character,” Joey Johnson said. “He just digs in and goes after it.”
PA placers
Slowly but surely, Port Angeles head coach Erik Gonzalez is building tradition with the Roughrider wrestling program.
The Riders have won four medals the last two years in the 3A tournament at the Mat Classic, which is one more than the program had the previous nine years combined (three).
Port Angeles’ back-to-back top-25 team finishes are also the best it has done in at least 15 years.
According to Raemer, the first Rider to place in back-to-back seasons since Rob DeCou in 1999 and 2000, the program’s recent success can be directly attributed to Gonzalez.
“It’s purely Gonzalez,” he said. “He’s not just focused on the high school kids, he’s focused on the younger kids [at Stevens Middle School] too. He’s there at every little kids practice trying to get that program up and going.
“I have a feeling that Port Angeles is going to be a top-10 team here pretty soon.”
No Wolves
Former Sequim Wolves coach Steve Chinn isn’t used to this.
A Mat Classic with nary a Sequim wrestler to be found?
That hasn’t happened since 1995, a period of time that saw the Wolves place more wrestlers on the state podium (28) than any other Peninsula school.
“There’s just not enough experience [with this year’s team],” said Chinn, who was on hand to watch other area wrestlers at the Tacoma Dome. “After last year’s seniors left, there was such a big hole.”
The one returning state placer from a year ago, heavyweight Thomas Gallagher, was never able to make weight after bulking up to 340 pounds during football season.
Without Gallagher, Sequim had just two seniors and two juniors in the regional tournament last week.
The results — only two wrestlers qualifying as state alternates — followed suit.
Senior moments
Three Peninsula seniors closed out their careers with victories in Tacoma: Port Townsend’s Brett Johnson, Port Angeles’ Adam Raemer and Forks’ Tanner House.
While each one of them is probably wishing those wins came Saturday night instead of Saturday afternoon, each of their coaches certainly knows the value of ending one’s high school experience victorious.
“[They] did something I didn’t do,” said Gonzalez, a former high school wrestler from the South Side of Chicago. “I ended with a loss both my junior and senior year.”
Quick hitters
• Here’s one more reason for Brett Johnson to be proud of his back-to-back third place finishes.
Only three other Peninsula wrestlers have placed in the top three two years in a row since 1996. Two of those athletes (Sloan Gutierrez and Keith Johnson) come from Port Townsend, and the other (Luke Dixon) is from Forks.
• It should also be noted that only one Port Townsend wrestler has won a state title in school history: Joe Harper in 1982.
The Peninsula has produced just 10 state champions all-time. Forks leads the way with five, while Sequim and Port Angeles each have two.
So, yeah, it’s kind of hard to win state.
• Nary a Peninsula school managed to finish in the top 20 of its team standings this year.
The last time that happened was 2003, when Port Angeles’ 21st-place team mark was tops among the area schools. The Riders’ 25th-place finish this year was the best in the area.
Forks finished 26th in 1A, while Port Townsend was 28th in the same classification.
• Forks has now placed at least one wrestler in the Mat Classic for five straight years, the longest such streak on the Peninsula.
Sequim had been the area’s top school in that department heading into this season, having placed wrestlers six years in a row. Obviously, they will now have to start from scratch.
• The Peninsula’s overall record at state this year: 17-21.
Port Angeles (5-5) was the only school with a .500 or above record, with Port Townsend going 4-5 overall and Forks 8-11.
• The area’s five state placers, while not nearly as big as last year’s number (11), is actually about average for the last 15 years (5.4).
For those who aren’t well-versed in algebra, that comes out to a total of 81 placers. The lowest number during that time is two in 2004 and the highest 11 (2009).
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Matt Schubert is the outdoors and sports columnist for the Peninsula Daily News. His column regularly appears on Thursdays and Fridays. He can be reached at matt.schubert@peninsuladailynews.com.