COVINGTON, Ind. —  Seeger opened its wrestling season with a 48-24 win over Covington. All of the Patriot individual wins came on either pins or forfeits.

 Both teams put young squads on the mat and the coaches were eager to see how their grapplers would fare. Seeger coach Tom Cook came away the happier of the two as he saw quite a bit that he liked.

“In the first meet of the year, I want to see who’s willing to battle and who’s not,” he said. “I had two kids who were down [behind on points] and came back to win. That’s huge.”

 Seeger currently has three holes in its lineup with Cook hoping eventually to be able to fill two of them. For the meeting with Covington, he shuffled his lineup to get as many matches as he could.

 “We moved our 70 to 82 and he did a great job,” said Cook about Jack Kay. “He’s an undersized 70 and may even drop down to 60 later this year.”

Cook also said he liked the way Jordan Horath wrestled and he was happy with his new heavyweight.

“He’s never wrestled before,” said Cook of Frank Briddick, “and yet he managed to get a couple of escapes.”

Things were gloomier for Covington coach Mike Thompson, whose team was competing in its second match of the season.

“We lost to Southmont 55-21 with several forfeits so we were pretty competitive with them,” he said, “but tonight I didn’t like much of what I saw. It was painful to watch.”

Thompson said his team had been working on drills for almost four weeks and yet claimed his team seemed to have forgotten them all when facing Seeger.

“Sure, we’ve got some young guys,” he explained, “but we’ve got some with experience that you’d never know from what they did tonight – that’s what’s disappointing for me.”

He did have kind words for two members of his squad, describing Karson Allen as having “simply wrestled well” and Garrett Reynolds as “being smart and doing what he could to get a win against a wrestler who outweighed him.”

Thompson said several members of his team need to give some extra effort in the gym.

“We had a couple of guys lose by pins where they seemed to tire and give up,” he explained. “We need to work harder in practice so that won’t happen again.”

 Cook said one of his concerns was the fitness of his team and, unlike Thompson, said he thought his team was in good shape.

“You always wonder how you’re doing before a first meet,” said Cook. “You think you’re in good shape, but until you face somebody else, you don’t really know. I think we pushed hard in practice and it showed.”

Cook gave his overall impression of his squad by saying, “We’re a young team that could be decent by the end of the year”.

Thompson described the night by saying, “This match needs to be erased quickly. We’ll move on starting tonight. We’re going to have some words in practice to get ready for Saturday’s [Covington Invitational] meet.”