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Winning a fifth straight NCCC title will be challenging for AHS

AVON, Dec. 9 — The Avon High wrestling team has won the last four NCCC championships and have a 27-game match winning streak within the league that dates back to 2007. Winning a fifth straight league title may be a bit tougher than it was a year ago. Avon (14-8, 7-0 NCCC) has just 24 wrestlers out for the team, one of the smaller teams under coach John McLaughlin in the last few years.

“We’re struggling to fill all (14) of the weight classes,” he said. “We might be a better tournament team. In the dual meets, we might have some holes (in the lineup).”

One thing won’t change, though. There will still be some talented wrestlers in the Falcon lineup. Senior Alex Heston, junior Tyler Mattioda, sophomore Joe Murphy and junior Jessica McCamish are all back on the mat.
Heston was 24-8 a year ago at 119 pounds and won a NCCC title. Mattioda (22-10) also won a NCCC championship at 103 while Murphy was 32-4 with an NCCC title and a fifth place finish at the Class L tournament at 152 pounds. McCamish missed all of last season with a knee injury but she won 22 matches as a freshman and was an All-American wrestler when she was in middle school.

One big loss was sophomore Jimmy Murphy who broke his hand in the final game of the football season against Windsor Locks. He is out for eight weeks and will see limited action.

There will be 10 new weight classes this winter after the wrestling rules committee of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) approved 17 wrestling rules revisions last April. The lightest weight class will rise from 103 pounds to 106 pounds. By the end of the season, it will be up to 108 pounds.

The new weight classifications have just three weight classes from 125 to 145 pounds when there used to be four and there will be five weight classes from 171 to 285 instead of four. The new weight classes will be 106, 113, 120, 126, 132, 138, 145, 152, 160, 170, 182, 195, 220 and 285.

“The change in weight classes resulted from a three-to-four year process,” said Dale Pleimann, chair of the NFHS Wrestling Rules Committee. “The rules committee was able to analyze data from almost 200,000 wrestlers across the country, with the goal to create weight classes that have approximately 7 percent of the wrestlers in each weight class.”

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Gerry deSimas, Jr., is the editor and founder of The Collinsville Press. He is an award-winning writer and has been covering sports in Connecticut and New England for more than 40 years. He was inducted into the New England High School Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2018.

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