State Champion!

What a wild weekend! We got to Casper on Thursday evening. The roads were great once we got out of the Lovell area. We were worried about that so we got going earlier than we had planned. Then on Friday morning Jacob woke up puking. Rats. He had a really tough day. I was able to sneak away twice to watch Mark wrestle. I was sorry to miss most of the other boys wrestling but I needed to stay with Jacob. By Friday night he started to get some color back in his face and wanted to eat an apple. We were sure that he would just throw it up but he ate it up and then slept all night long. Mark had a bye for the first round and then won his two matches on Friday which put him in the Championship match against Hayden Davidson on Saturday night. I wish I had been to all of the sessions. State wrestling is so full of pageantry and show. I am sure it made Mark nervous with all of the fanfare. Then having to watch all of the lower weights wrestle before it was his turn was difficult.

Rachael, Eli and Eve came to Casper and then stayed with us on Saturday night. I wish we would have had more time with them but even after Mark was done there are hours of picture taking and more marching about. Congratulations to Preston who also won the 103 championship.

This is Sparky pinning a kid from Lusk.Mark getting the win over the Wind River guy.
This is the Face Off
This is the last throw of the match. Sorry about the blurriness of the picture, I cropped it out of the video and these guys were moving fast right here. Mark and Hayden were pretty well matched up and Mark was very determined and ready for the match. After a short false start because of a timer error, they started wrestling. Hayden was trying to get a throw in and Mark was countering. In this picture Mark was throwing Hayden but somewhere along the move, Hayden twisted his knee and then landed hard on it and that was the end of the match. He was done and couldn't wrestle anymore. That is too bad for him, you hate to see kids get hurt.
Mark won the 2A Championship at 215!

Here they are on the award stand.

Here is a pretty happy team after being awarded the third place plaque. We were behind Greybull by only 3.5 points. We will really miss Darren Ballard who is our only senior. He has been a great leader and a great friend to Mark.

I need to add that I got a ton of texts telling Mark congratulations! Thanks to Rachael and Eli for coming to watch and thanks for Jared for trying to come ( those flights from New Mexico are quite pricey) and I know that Lucas really wanted to be there. This has been a long season. I really appreciate my mom for taking care of the house and dogs while I was gone. It was a long weekend and I am sure it was for her too. You are my hero, Mom.