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Sports

Lindbergh Uses Depth to Overcome Sickness, Dominates Fox

With three of its top wrestlers sick, Lindbergh used three JV wrestlers to win at Fox, 55-15.

With three of his top wrestlers sick and unavailable Wednesday night against Fox, Lindbergh coach Josh Hansel inserted a trio of JV wrestlers into his lineup that hadn’t seen any varsity action all year.

Those in the stands who weren’t aware of the changes would have had no idea.

All three JV wrestlers made the most of their varsity debuts, pinning their opponents to help Lindbergh defeat Fox 55-15 in a lopsided duel at Fox High School.

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“I thought we looked pretty good,” Hansel said. “Three guys that haven’t been in the lineup the entire year and all three of them won. We looked pretty good doing it. That’s good. It shows that our JV has been working hard and I can take guys out of the lineup and plug them in ours and expect wins and it happened.”

The most impressive substitute had to be Lars Anderson (152 pounds), who defeated Fox’s Bill Michel with a pin in the second round. Anderson was subbing in for Michael Slyman, who has a 29-1 record and is considered a favorite to win the state title next month.

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With Slyman out for a few weeks with mono, Anderson looks like he could be a viable fill in for Hansel and the Flyers.

“Lars is a good kid,” Hansel said. “He’s a kid that we kind of talked about at the beginning of the year that it was very possible he would break our lineup and he’d be in there, but we didn’t know how the weights would shake out. He ends up being stuck behind Slyman, one of the top three or four guys in the entire state and he’s kind of the odd man out.

“He’s only a sophomore so we said it was OK to get him some time on JV, but we knew at some point we would probably need to bring him up and give him some time, and it just worked out and we did that tonight and he looked good. Lars is out there to impress. He wants to make sure we know who he is, and we do. And I think they do after tonight.”

Blake Rudloft made his presence known early as well. Making his varsity debut in the opening match of the night at 189 pounds, Rudloft pinned Brandon Coleman in just 36 seconds to put the Flyers up 6-0.

Chris Ripple and Kenny Hanes followed with pins for the Warriors to put them up 12-6. But little did they know, those would be two of their three wins and their only two pins of the night.

Lindbergh won via byes in the next two matches to take an 18-12 lead and never looked back from there. Matt Deposky (125 pounds) won in a major decision before Tom Korenak (130 pounds) went to work against Fox’s best wrestler, Alex Vaughn.

Korenak led 4-1 after two rounds before Vaughn became dizzy and had trouble standing up. A break was called and Vaughn was helped to the side. Soon after, he was vomiting into a trash can. The Fox wrestler struggled to even stay on his feet and eventually withdrew from the match from what appeared to be dehydration and fatigue.

The win went as a six-point injury decision, but Korenak had dominated the first two rounds and was likely on his way to a win.

“I’ve never seen that happen,” Korenak said. “I feel bad for him. It’s not the best way to get a win but I’ll take it. A win is a win and it feels good to win.”

His brother Jack Korenak, a freshman, won a three-point decision at 135 pounds before Derrek Massey (145 pounds) pinned his opponent barely 20 seconds into the match.

Anderson followed with his pin and Kevin Lindstrom (160 pounds) and Tyler Kolb (171 pounds) followed with wins to put a stamp on an impressive night for Lindbergh.

“We’re a pretty competitive junior varsity team and those guys are itching to get on varsity and it was a situation where we put those kids in there and they took their chance and ran with it,” Hansel said. “It was like the anti-Eureka duel. Everything didn’t go our way against Eureka and it all went our way here against Fox.”

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