Kawa, Sigmund earn medals; Raiders win five state matches

WIAA DIV. 2 STATE WRESTLING

A strong start for the Medford wrestlers didn’t carry all the way through the WIAA Division 2 individual state championship tournament the way they wanted, but the Raiders group of four came home with two medals, five combined wins and, for three of them, motivation to hopefully earn the opportunity to do better next year.

Senior Thad Sigmund and junior Logan Kawa each won two matches with Kawa reaching the 160-pound semifinals Friday night and got to the placement rounds on Saturday. Both lost two matches that day to slide to sixth in their brackets, but that got them to the awards podium that night.

Sophomore Gage Losiewicz went 1-2 at 145 pounds in his second state appearance and junior Braxton Weissmiller lost his lone match in Thursday’s preliminary round.

“There’s always a bunch of highs and lows at the state tournament, but anytime we bring four –– that’s the most I’ve personally brought, I had one other year where we brought four kids –– it’s a good end to the year,” Medford head coach Brandon Marcis said after the Raiders wrapped up competition Saturday after- noon. “We always want to finish strong on this last day. Going 0-4 is rough, but (Kawa and Sigmund) did what they had to do to get on the podium. They’ve never gotten hardware before, so that’s a big accomplishment. It’s a tough tournament. It’s the state tournament. Every time you get hardware, it’s good.”

Kawa won his first two matches to get within one win of making it to Saturday’s championship. The fifth-seed in his 12man bracket, Kawa opened with a 7-2 win over 12th-seeded Maddox Goebel (3915), a sophomore from Darlington-Black Hawk. Kawa got the first takedown in the opening period, got another one in the second to go up 5-0 and then the wrestlers traded reversals to end the period. Kawa rode out Goebel in a scoreless third period.

“It was eye-opening with how many people are there,” Kawa said of being on the Kohl Center floor Thursday. “It’s the big stage. It’s what everybody dreams to be on. It was amazing. It gave me butterflies.

“I knew that match was one I needed to do well,” he added. “It was one where I needed to finish strong to actually make it anywhere. I put it in my mind that I needed to outwork him, get the points I needed to finish that match and I pulled it off. Still, nothing’s easy here. I had to work for it.”

Kawa advanced to a Friday quarterfinal with fourth-seeded L’Shawn Taylor of Greendale Martin Luther (34-4) and that turned out to be a mismatch as Kawa set the pace and got the first takedown with 10 seconds left in the first period. He led 6-0 in the second after an escape and a stalling point, then he took Taylor down and pinned him at the edge of the mat at the 4:00 mark as the period expired.

“I felt like I was in control,” Kawa said. “After I hit my first few attacks I felt like he was scared of me. He was on the defensive side, so I just kept going after him until I could catch him and I got him in the right spot and stuck him. I caught him with a turk. I was actually just going for back points and I caught the head in a reverse half and he rolled out of that, so I arm barred him and ended sticking him with that.”

In the semifinals Friday night, Kawa met Kewaskum senior Braeden Scoles, who not only was the bracket’s top seed, he was on a mission to win his fourth straight state title. Scoles (52-0) took a 21-2 technical fall in 4:19 and went on to win that fourth title Saturday with a 19-4 technical fall over Owen Wasley of St. Croix Central (40-2), who beat Kawa in the sectional final match on Feb. 18.

“Logan had a good tournament, especially making the semifinals,” Marcis said. “He wrestled like a man on fire there in the first couple rounds. We had a tough draw with the kid there, who we knew was tough. We had a plan for him. He’s just really good. It is what it is. We came back and got on the podium. Never been on the podium before, never been to the state tournament before. So it’s a good tournament.”

“We went in with the plan of anybody can be beaten,” Kawa said. “But we knew it was going to have to be a catch or something. So we went out there and tried going upper body with him, seeing if I could work anything with him, but he’s solid at all levels. He showed the reason he has the record he does.”

Slow starts hurt Kawa on Saturday. In the consolation semifinal, he got taken down almost immediately by Two Rivers junior Justin Klinkner (37-9) and that was the difference in a 3-1 loss. In the fifth-place match with Prairie du Chien junior Jeremiah Avery, a four-point reversal and near fall combination put Kawa in a 6-0 second-period hole. He escaped it for a point and got takedown with five seconds left to fall short at 6-4.

Kawa finished his breakthrough season at 49-13.

“It’s amazing for the first time being down here to make it that far,” Kawa said. “It sucks that I couldn’t have done better, but nothing I can do it about now. I just have to look to the future.”

“The good thing that Logan has is another year,” Marcis said. “Another year of opportunity for him. He learned a couple of lessons this weekend that he’ll definitely carry into next season. Urgency for scoring in the first period being one of them.”

As the 11th seed at 120 pounds, Sigmund started his final prep tournament and first state appearance Thursday with a 4-2 win over sixth-seeded Peter Tomazevic of Freedom (45-9) to earn his third match in 11 days with second-seeded Colton Hush of Baldwin-Woodville (44-4) in Friday’s quarterfinals.

“It was pretty nerve wracking stepping out for the first time in front of that big crowd,” Sigmund said. “It was kind of surreal. But I just had to block all of that and just wrestle the best that I could. It was a pretty close match at first. He was getting ahead. I just kind of calmed down, focused. I caught him where he shouldn’t have been and it paid off for me.”

Close matches were a theme throughout the weekend in the 120-pound bracket as Sigmund expected it would be last week. Against Hush, who he had split his team sectional and individual matches with the previous week, Sigmund was taken down in the first period and got reversed early in the second to fall behind 4-0. He got a reversal in the third to get back in it, but he couldn’t turn that into more points and lost 4-2.

“Another tight match,” Sigmund said. “I thought I had him at first, but he pulled out some stuff that he hadn’t really done before. He kinda came with a different approach. He caught me off-guard. I did (think I was still in it). Coach tells always to win the third period. I feel as though I did win the third period, but it didn’t really help me with the rest of the match.”

The loss pushed Sigmund to a consolation match to stay alive with seventhseeded Drake Gosda (45-9), a junior from Mauston-Necedah. Gosda led 4-2 going into the last 30 seconds of the five-minute match when Sigmund suddenly got some leverage, reversed Gosda and stuck him at 4:46 to clinch a medal.

“I don’t even know,” Sigmund said. “It just kinda fell into my hands and I was like I’ll take it. It was a big scramble and I usually thrive in scrambles. That’s when I do my best wrestling and caught him where he shouldn’t have been and stuck him.”

“He cradled him right to his back,” Marcis said. “It’s pretty funny because we talk about cradles and which direction to take them once we get it locked up. We call it a suicide cradle when you take it over your chest because you have to roll over your back to get it. It’s not the first thing that we teach, but it worked for him. It was a clutch move, that’s for sure. He did it at the right time. He knew he had to do it. Sometimes that’s the mental part of it. He knew he had to find a way or make one and he did.”

Like Kawa, Sigmund spent Saturday wrestling from behind. In the consolation semifinals, he met Amery’s Lane Anderson (43-13) for the third weekend in a row and got nothing going in a 5-1 loss. In the fifth-place match with secondseeded Bob Huntley (51-5), a sophomore from Brillion, Sigmund was down 4-0 in the second period, when he got a reversal and nearly chest-crushed his way to a stunning pin. The match was tied 4-4 going into the third and Sigmund got a quick escape to take a brief 5-4 lead, but Huntley took him down and won 6-5.

“When I chest crushed him I thought I could’ve got him, but he was such a strong kid I couldn’t really just hold him there,” Sigmund said. “He snuck out and almost pinned me when he cradled me. I got my leg caught and I just couldn’t really move, so I’m thinking I can’t let this happen. Last match of my high school career and I get pinned for the first time.”

Like Kawa, Sigmund finished the year one win away from 50 at 49-11 and closed a strong career with more than 100 wins.

“Just the fact that I did podium feels good because there’s not a lot of kids that actually get to do that,” Sigmund said. “My brother (Zeke) went three times and could never pull it off, so now I got that to rub in his face.”

Sigmund, though, said his brother certainly helped get him there.

“Growing up we were constantly wrestling around, just screwing off,” he said. “I think that might have paid off a little bit. As we get older, he gets wiser in the wrestling world and then he helps teach me stuff that I didn’t know, which is why the younger brothers a lot of times get to be better than the older ones because they learn through their brothers’ mistakes and learn to push through that.”

After a one-and-done state appearance at 132 pounds last year, the eighth-seeded Losiewicz got his first state win Thursday by pinning ninth-seeded Jack Dubach of Monroe (30-5) in 3:20 in a 145-pound opener. He got the first takedown in the first period and started the second period with a reversal that led to his pin.

A tough seeding draw then caught up to Losiewicz. Against top-seeded and eventual champion Nathan Vande Hey of Freedom (54-3), Losiewicz hung tough for awhile and nearly made it the distance, but Vande Hey got the pin in 5:47. In the consolation match Friday afternoon, fourth-seeded senior Ayden Hart of Winneconne broke a 2-2 second-period tie with a couple of takedowns and won 10-5 to end Losiewicz’s season at 42-12.

“Gage had a tough draw,” Marcis said. “He wrestled the Freedom kid who’s in the finals and the number-one seed and was really good. I thought Gage wrestled him really tough. Earlier in the year he got tech falled by him. He was in it. He had him in a couple of hairy positions. One time he was in a front-quarter and the kid grimaced in pain a little bit, looked at his coaches. We were right there. The thing that separates you from the other guy is not as much as the kids always think.”

Weissmiller (34-21) entered 220-pound competition as the 12th seed and met fifthseeded Damon Schmidt of Brillion (39-6) in his opener Thursday. Schmidt got a takedown just under a minute in and got the pin in 1:39. Schmidt went on to reach the semifinals, where he was pinned in just 13 seconds by Amery’s unbeaten Koy Hopke before finishing fourth.

“This was really good for Braxton,” Marcis said. “He’s another guy that gets another opportunity next year. I see him carrying these lessons with him. You practice something over and over and over and you can preach to them over and over and over, but a lot of times it’s a memorable experience like the state tournament that will make some of those lessons stick with the kids. For Braxton, it was urgency with hand control. Just not letting the guy control the tie, control the hands. It’s the little things that make a difference. He’ll take that with him.”

Thad Sigmund Sixth place, 120 pounds

Logan Kawa Sixth place, 160 pounds