Fini

The Bonnabel Bruins ran away with the tri-meet against Grace King and East Jefferson on Wednesday, November 8th, at the Bonnabel gymnasium, tallying 105 points.  Runner-up Grace King scored 57 points and East Jefferson 17 points to place third.  Bonnabel won eight matches and 10 forfeits in the event.  The Irish and the Warriors each won three matches, but Grace King won more forfeits than East Jefferson.

Ahh...who can forget those days of stellar Louisiana high school wrestling reporting, rivaling national reporting by sportswriters like Mitch Album of the Detroit Free Press, George Plimpton, who wrote Paper Lion (among other books), and our own Peter Finney of the Times-Picayune?  The Louisiana Wrestling News editor, of course, does not consider his wordsmithery to be in those circles (something closer to one of Dante's "Nine Circles" comes to mind), but at least he did think of "wordsmithery" when he deemed that "wordsmithing" was "just not cricket."

On November 8th Grace King and East Jefferson travelled to Bonnabel for a tri-meet of former Jefferson Parish powerhouses.  Bonnabel prevailed with a 54-21 win over Grace King and a 51-5 win over East Jefferson.  In the third match, the Irish of Grace King defeated east Jefferson's Warriors 36-12.

Each team appears to be in the rebuilding process.  Over the last three years and into this season, Mike Lachney has rejuvenated a Bonnabel program that did not exist from 2012 to 2014, and currently has 12 wrestlers.  Roberto Furtado's Grace King roster has 18 wrestlers, and that number is helped by Coach Furtado's tenure as the coach, which is between 12 and 20 years.  Mike Shields' East Jefferson squad has only 11 wrestlers on their roster, but also has had four coaching changes in less than a decade.  King and East Jefferson, while still Class 5A schools, do not have the enrolments they did in the past, evidenced by their classification by the LHSAA as Division II teams.

East Jefferson's team is among the ranks of programs with girls.  Junior Olivia Lombreras did very well in her two matches in last Wednesday's meet, even if she has yet to notch her first victory.  That takes a little time, though, for the vast majority of wrestlers whether they are male or female, and this was Miss Lombreras' first time competing against unknown opponents.  The Warriors have another young lady on the team.  Her paperwork is being processed, so she is not yet on the TrackWrestling roster (and hence the editor does not know her name), but she was at Bonnabel helping her teammates warm-up for their matches.

Bonnabel will next face Destrehan and East Ascension at Destrehan this Wednesday.  Also on Wednesday East Jefferson will travel to De la Salle for a dual meet and Grace King will face Fontainebleau and Covington.

*   Often it is the one who asks to have a lot of photographs published who then wins his match in the first period, limiting how many photographs one can take.  Luckily, Bonnabel's Henry White, IV, provided another opportunity for a photograph to be published.

EDITOR'S NOTE:  The editor is not confident about whether certain matches were official matches or exhibition matches.  Under the exhibition matches is the editor's email address.  If you find a match listed in error, please notify the editor by informing him of the weight class and names of the competitors, or the number of the exhibition matches, and whether those matches should be moved to the "official" ones or if an "official" one should be moved to the exhibition sections.

Back to Top