Dragons beat Jonesboro; lose to Parkview

By By R. Garry Glenn

Posted 9:57AM on Thursday 10th January 2002 ( 23 years ago )

LILBURN - When a Class A school challenges a Class AAAAA school, you expect the bigger folks to come out on top, right? Well, that was just the case in one match anway of a tri-meet Wednesday night in Lilburn when Class A defending State Wrestling Champion Jefferson took its top rated squad to challenge the Class AAAAA No. 2-ranked team at Parkview. The Dragons actually jumped into a 10-3 lead by winning three of the first four matches wrestled before the Panthers put on a 50-0 blitz and won the match 53-10. Brothers Forrest and Hunter Garner and Jeremy Smith picked up wins for Jefferson against Parkview. Both Parkview(14-1) and Jefferson (11-1), though, had dominating wins over Jonesboro, the other Class AAAAA school involved in Wednesday's tri-meet. The Dragons won 67-9, while the Panthers shut out the Cardinals 72-0. Prior to Wednesday, Jefferson had been undefeated, and had won all five tournaments the Dragons had entered. Parkview's lone loss came to McEachern, another top wrestling school, earlier this season, before the Parkview football players joined the team. The Panthers would not mind adding a State wrestling title to their football championship. Jefferson is favored to repeat as Class A champs. Parkview co-head coach Dennis Stromie complimented Jefferson. "They are really good," Stromie said noting facing quality competition was good for both teams. "You want to wrestle good people to get better." "It's fun to wrestle people you're friends with," Stromie said, adding that many times you face people you really don't like that much. "It's good for us," Jefferson coach Doug Thurmond said, despite their first loss of the season. "We look for good, tough competition, and basically we got it tonight. Parkview handed it to us; but that was okay. They're 5-A. We're single-A. "We got about three or four hundred kids in our school. They got 'bout three thousand, so I feel real good with what we did tonight. We won three. We beat some good kids, and the ones that lost hung in there pretty good; so I felt good about it." Thurmond says the tough competition was "an attitude adjustment" and proved they still have work to do; and as long as they didn't get anybody else hurt, which they didn't, he was satisfied. "You're never gonna be the best unless you wrestle the best," Thurmond continued. "Basically the way we looked at it was we had to come down here and we may figured that we's possibly gonna get it handed to us, and we did. That just gives us something to work for for February when the big stakes are there- which is State." Thurmond pointed out that Parkview had seven seniors and the Dragons had two, and also two normal Jefferson starters were out due to illness and injury. Next year, Parkview has to come to Jefferson. "That was the deal, " Thurmond said with a smile.

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