East Hampton/Pierson/Bridgehampton Wrestling Continues Its Upward Trend

Every week, East Hampton/Pierson/Bridgehampton wrestling head coach Ethan Mitchell said, it seems like his team is making history.

On Friday night, the Bonackers pulled out a gutsy 37-28 victory at home over West Babylon to improve to 2-1 in League IV home dual meets. Mitchell said he expects his team to finish 3-3 when all is said and done after his team wrestled at West Islip on Wednesday, and for a program that barely had enough wrestlers to field a team not too long ago, it’s a huge accomplishment.

The program hasn’t seen as much success as it has this season in close to 20 years.

“We’ve built up quite the momentum here and it’s going to be awesome because we’re going to keep seeing it,” he said.

As expected, last week’s match with West Babylon was competitive and it came down to the last bout of the night at 138 pounds between Bonacker Luke Castillo and Eagle James Dauch. East Hampton was clinging to a 31-28 lead going into it, so Dauch was going to need to win either by major decision, technical fall or pin to win it for West Babylon. Dauch put a scare into Bonac, scoring the first take down, but Castillo came up big with a pin with just two seconds to go in the first period to clinch it for Bonac.

“Luke wrestled tough and responded well after falling behind to come back and pin the kid,” Mitchell said.

The very next day after that hard-fought match against West Babylon, the Bonackers competed in the Cory Hubbard Duals at Westhampton Beach High School, where they were able to compete in the match for fifth place against the host Hurricanes. Bonac had beaten Westhampton Beach at its host tournament, the Sprig Gardner, at the beginning of the season. Facing a five-point deficit going into the final bout at 110 pounds, Anthony Petersohn needed to pin his opponent Max Orr in order to get East Hampton the win outright. To his credit, he won via major decision (13-0), but Orr avoided getting pinned and Westhampton Beach won the match, 35-34.

Mitchell, who coached at Westhampton Beach prior to coming over to East Hampton, said with the season series tied at 1-1, it’ll be nice to see how the rubber match plays out at the inaugural Anthony Cipriano Invitational at Copiague High School this Saturday, January 14. Overall, the Cory Hubbard Duals was a highly competitive tournament for his team, facing some of the top teams in the county in Patchogue-Medford, the overall winner, Bellport, Miller Place and Sayville, but it was worth the experience all of his wrestlers got.

“The Westhampton Beach match was a heartbreaker, but by the end of the day I was able to rework my perspective and I realized I coached half of Westhampton kids at kid wrestling while I was over there,” Mitchell explained. “Outside of Bronco [Campsey], no one else here at East Hampton has wrestled more than four years, and I made sure we acknowledged that by the end of the tournament. We do have seniors and juniors on our team, but they haven’t been wrestling for three or four years, so it’s amazing with the amount of experience we do have and how well we’ve wrestled, it’s definitely something to be proud of. We’re certainly a sum of our parts. When we’re all together, we’re all together. When a couple of us show inexperience in tough situations, that’s where it beaks down a little bit.

“But it was great going down there to Westhampton Beach with those teams,” Mitchell added. “We knew we were going to be severely tested, and I wanted to see how we would respond, how our studs rank up with them, some of the best in the county. More importantly, how our average guys stack up against some of the above average guys, and some of these guys refusing to get pinned, like J.P. Amaden who wrestled up at 145 for us, did an awesome job against some high-caliber kids. Beating Newfield for us was big, too.”