Skaneateles — It turns out that the Skaneateles wrestling season did not end with the Section III championships – at least not for J.W. Simmons.
Though many Lakers wrestlers had exceptional runs this winter, only Simmons, a junior who competes at 99 pounds, was given a wild-card berth for next weekend’s New York State Public High School Athletic Association Division II championships at Albany’s Times Union Center.
While Skaneateles made its way through a historic 21-0 season that included the team’s first league title since 1981, Simmons established himself as a force, going 25-3. Then he won the sectional Class C championship Feb. 6 at Adirondack, edging Onondaga’s Dylan Price 1-0 in the title bout.
That gave Simmons a no. 2 seed for the Division II (small school) sectional meet a week later at SRC Arena. Simmons pinned Connor Deforest (Mount Markham) and Devin Coleman (Oneida) before a rematch with Price in the semifinals resulted in a 3-1 victory.
Though Simmons lost in the final to Central Valley Academy’s Jon Charles in a second-period fall, he still had a 31-3 record – which proved good enough to earn one of the wild-card berths at 99 for the state meet.
Simmons is the sixth Skaneateles wrestler to make it to the state meet and the second to make it this far since the program’s revival a decade ago. Kevin Pembridge was a wild-card selection in 2011.
Bill McCauley won the program’s lone state title in 1969 at 215 pounds after making it the year before, with Ken Rankin (1964), Steve Groce (1976) and Joe Brillo (1981) the others.
All told, Section III is sending 48 wrestlers to Albany – its 30 champions plus 18 at-large entrants, 16 of them in Division II. Matches begin at the Times Union Center on Feb. 26 at 10 a.m., with two rounds that day and semifinals on the morning of Feb. 27 before the title bouts later that night at 6:30.
