WYOMING – The Punchers had a full plate this week with five duels hosted by Rich County, Utah and Dubois. The team went 2-3 in those duels.

On Thursday, Jan. 21, the team started off with duels versus Rich County and Mountain View. It was great to get our team back from illness and injury and put a full lineup out there.

We lost both duels on Thursday. The positive side to these duels was that we got better from the first to the second duel. We started off slow versus Rich and did not match their intensity. That set us back at the start.

We did wrestle better against Mountain View, but still had some things we need to clean up going forward.

On Friday, Jan. 22, we started off with Jackson and that was a very competitive duel between the two teams. We performed better than we did on Thursday. We worked wrist control and bottom wrestling before the duel and we saw those things in the match. That was exciting to see.

We continued to grow as we moved into the duel with Dubois. Again, we had some very competitive matches where the wrestling was strong. We finished up the day with what I thought was our best wrestling with a duel versus Wind River.

I liked how we improved our aggressiveness on Friday. That was great to see us respond to how we wrestled on Thursday. We saw a lot of improvement on our feet and we really did a nice job fighting for wrist control. There were a lot of close matches, and we just need to keep working on basics and clean up several things going into this week.

I really liked how sophomore Bradley Rodda wrestled this week. He started to flash in his matches. He is not scoring points and earning some takedowns.

I loved how hard junior Jaron Petty competed for us this week. He fought out of some difficult situations and battled in each match.

Junior Robert Hunt continues to grow as a first-year wrestler and we are starting to see him pick up technique and skill. Freshman Jackie Meador had a great week going 4-1 on the weekend. Sophomore Brandon Jones had a very nice week in wrestling as well for us.

This week, we have Senior Night on Tuesday versus Pinedale and on Saturday, we are in Pinedale to wrestle Wind River, Cokeville and Jackson.