PONIES END DECEMBER ON A HIGH NOTE
Dateline: Coach Onken’s Living Room 7:48PM 12/21/2025
The Ponies end 2025 on a high note with some dual wins and taking home some hardware from the Christmas Tournament in Rochester. Lets begin with dual meet wins. On December 11th the Ponies went to Forest Lake for a Suburban East Conference tri against the Rangers and the Wolfpack of Park Cottage Grove. After Forest Lake wrestled Park in round 1, the Ponies took on the Wolfpack and came away with their second conference victory by a score of 58-9. Isaac Leonard lost a close battle with highly ranked Zach Carr 13-10. It came down to the last few seconds with Carr scoring to end the match. In the final round the Ponies took on the home team Rangers. This dual was much closer but the Ponies still came out on top winning 43-22. George Jones saw his first action of the season losing a close decision to Wasilk. This was also Kingston Pak’s first match on varsity for the Ponies. At the end of the night the Ponies were 8-0 overall and 3-0 in conference.
On Thursday December 18th the Ponies traveled to White Bear Lake for more Suburban East Conference duals with the Bears and the Raptors from East Ridge. Neither team put up much of a fight with the Ponies winning against WBL by a score of 53-12 and over East Ridge by a score of 63-6. George Jones recorded his first 2 Ponies victories. The team ends the 2025 year at 10-0 and 5-0 in conference. The Ponies will wrestle more duals in the New Year beginning with The Clash in La Crosse, WI over break.
Over the weekend the varsity and JV split up with the varsity in Rochester for the Matboss MN Christmas Tournament and the JV in Anoka for their Holiday Dual Tournament. Lets start with the JV who wrestled 4 duals on Saturday. Plenty of good effort was put in but with some holes in the lineup and some injured wrestlers the Ponies would go 1-3 on the day and finish 14th out of 16 teams. All the dual losses were a one match swing away from being a win, so competitive, just not in the Ponies favor. On a positive note, Colton Johnston picked up a couple of wins with some of his first matches of the season. Sawyer Deitner picked up his first victory of the season. Kingston Pak, Ryan Birkenmayer, Elijah Hunter and Eli Nye all went undefeated on the day.
The varsity had great success at the Christmas Tournament over Friday and Saturday. Last year they struggled to finish 4th while this year they moved into 2nd early in the tournament and held their 2nd place position throughout. They were able to hold off Shakopee and finish a respectable 2nd place to STMA with 271.5 points overall. They also did this with 11 wrestlers, 2 shy of a full lineup. The Ponies ended with 3 in the finals and 6 others who would place at their respective weight class. Below are the final results.
107-Chase Lawrence – 2nd place
114-Brodie Lawrence – 10th place
121-open
127-open
133-Noah Nicholson – 2nd place
139-August Hartung – DNP
145-Isaac Leonard – 8th place
152-George Jones – 10th place
160-Grayson Eggum – 2nd place
172-Braden Hatalla – DNP
189-Cael Spates – 7th place
215-Cohen Lumby – 3rd place
285-Andrew Olson – 4th place
That is all for now. There will be an update after The Clash.