Shorthanded and on the road, the Johnston wrestling team needed a lot to go its way to get out of North Kingstown with a victory on Thursday night.
The Panthers nearly pulled it off.
With three key starters in the lineup out with injury, Johnston carried a six-point lead into the final match of the day, but couldn’t hang on. North’s Richard Brown pinned Johnston’s Carson Kenny to end the match in a 39-39 tie.
It wasn’t a loss, and the tie kept the Panthers very much in the running for the Division I-South title. Still, it was a little bit unfulfilling.
“We have three starters out tonight,” Johnston head coach Matt Mancuso said. “We knew it would be tough. We had a chance – all we had to do was not get pinned. Couple inches the other way and we win.”
Johnston moved to 3-1-1 in D-I-South, and it still leads the division over 3-1 South Kingstown and 3-2 Mt. Hope. North is now 1-2-1.
The Panthers’ only loss of the season is to Cumberland, but since then they’ve been dealing with injuries that have forced them to scratch and claw to stay in contention. One of the top teams in the state last season and heading into this year, Johnston wrestled on Thursday without state place-finishers Rich Lonardo and Marco Conte, and state hopeful Mike Caparco.
While they’ll all likely return at some point, it’s tough with them on the sidelines.
“We had three JV guys in there,” Mancuso said. “That’s what happens.”
To contend with the Skippers, Johnston needed its top wrestlers to step up, and that wasn’t a problem. Tim Tedesco pinned North’s Jacob Haskell at 138 in just 35 seconds, Jonathan Soto bumped up to 132 from 126 and pinned Sean Daylor in the second round and Jesse Ribezzo registered a late first-round pin over Daniel Erwin at 145.
Those were 18 big points that the Panthers had to have.
“The guys we needed pins from wrestled well,” Mancuso said. “Timmy Tedesco has been wrestling great. He won the tough Cumberland tournament last weekend, and he went in there and did exactly what we asked him to do. Jesse Ribezzo, he had a bad loss last week and he ended up pinning the kid he lost to this weekend. He’s been a different person since then. Soto, I bumped him up tonight, and he got the pin for us when we needed it. That was a big win for us.”
Other Panthers stepped up as well. Isaiah O’Brien pinned Charles Dwayne at 113, Derric Vigeant pinned Simon Billings at 170 and Richard Conte pulled out a 10-3 win over Ryan Geib at 152.
Perhaps the team’s biggest win came at 182. With Johnston set to forfeit at 195 and 220, and holding a 12-point lead, Devin Soares took the mat at 182 needing a pin to put Johnston up by six when the heavyweight match came around.
He got the job done, pinning Zach LaPointe midway through the first round. That made it 39-21, and after the two forfeits it was 39-33 with Kenny and Brown headed to the mat.
“That was one we needed,” Mancuso said of Soares’ pin.
Kenny and Brown went back-and-forth in the first period, with Brown taking a 4-2 lead into the second. However, 45 seconds into that round, Kenny got taken down near the boundary of the mat and was pinned, with his shoulder just barely inbounds.
North celebrated a come-from-behind tie.
“We had a few guys get pinned,” Mancuso said. “We gave up too many pins. That was a killer, with the three guys out.”
In the other matches, Anthony Antonucci lost to Jeff Kantor 8-2 at 106, Tommy Nguyen was pinned by Noah Kreiger at 120 and Anthony Cardente was pinned by Drew Lombardi at 160.
The tie doesn’t change a ton for Johnston, which will still likely have to beat North Providence and Mt. Hope to win the division.
“A tie is not terrible. It keeps us in the running,” Mancuso said. “A loss ends it for us. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and we’ve got a showdown with Mt. Hope at the end of the season.”
Johnston also wrestled over the weekend in the Robert Smith Invitational, which it hosted in its own gym. O’Brien, Tedesco and Vigeant were the team’s top performers with second-place finishes in the 113, 138 and 170-pound classes, respectively. Fang, Soto and Kenny took third at 120, 126 and heavyweight. As a team, Johnston finished in fourth behind Franklin, Mass., Mt. Hope and Cranston West.
The Panthers were scheduled to be back in action on Wednesday against West and Middletown, with results unavailable at press time. Today, Johnston will be at 5-1 South Kingstown at 5:30 p.m., and then will have a big match at North Providence next Wednesday.
“I think we’re wrestling okay, but we could be a little bit better,” Mancuso said. “Cumberland is really the only match where we didn’t wrestle well.”
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