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Martino, Psihas win big at Battle at the Bridge
Even with defending state champion Beau Martino sidelined due to sickness, the Battlefield wrestling team still produced two first-place winners and one second-place finisher at the Battle at the Bridge tournament Dec. 30 and 31. The team as a whole came in sixth place out of 17 spots.
Host team Woodbridge won with a score of 178 while Forest Park nudged past Fairfax 158.50 to 158 for second place. Paul VI (145) came in fourth and Brooke Point (125.50) finished 18.5 points above Battlefield (107) for fifth.
Brooks Martino, the younger brother of Beau, kept his perfect record intact by pinning three of his opponents and earning an opening-round forfeit win en route to winning the 103-pound weight class.
Only second-place finisher Skyler Trumpower of Forest Park made it into the second period against Martino before he too fell to the 25-0 Bobcat freshman. Trumpower had topped Martino’s teammate Josh Wilkens in the second round of the competition, 9-0. Wilkens went on finish sixth place overall with a 3-2 record.
Martino tried to make it three straight matches with first-round pins with an early take down of Trumpower, but his lock was not strong enough and Trumpower escaped.
When the second period came, Martino put himself into a much more winnable situation.
“I feel like I had it tighter that time, the second time,” Martino said of his cradle. “I locked it up better and was just in better position.”
“Little” Martino, as he is known on the Bobcat bench, at this point is simply following a family tradition by competing as a local powerhouse with hopes for a state title. His brother Gregg (Class of 2007) finished second in states during his junior year while Beau captured Battlefield High School’s first-ever state crown last year with a victory in the 103-pound weight class. Beau now wrestles at 112.
“[To] fill in Beau’s 103 spot where he won states last year is always tough. I just need to go out there, work hard, and good things will happen,” said the freshman Martino.
Not to be outdone by his underclassman teammate, senior Peter Psihas followed suit by crushing the 215-pound division. After winning by forfeit in the first round, he mauled his subsequent competition with back-to-back-to-back first-period pins.
“It’s finals; if you can’t get up for that, you can’t get up for anything,” he said.
Psihas was the second Battlefield wrestler in the final round of the tournament to face off against a Paul VI opponent for the gold. Earlier that afternoon, 135-pounder Donny Baumgart outlasted Battlefield’s Matt Bowman in a 10-6 decision victory. Like Psihas and Martino, Bowman earned three pins on the day but fell short of a fourth win.
“I noticed he doesn’t really come towards when he wrestles. He’s more of a defensive [person] and that he’ll come at me afterwards,” Baumgart said about Bowman. “So I just wait for him to come to me and work from there.”
The four-year varsity starter figured out how to manage Bowman strategically rather than simply go for pins like he did against Osbourn Park and W.T. Woodson opponents in the first two rounds.
“Whenever I felt myself in a dangerous position, I either wait for a stalemate or I just wrestle smarter and make sure I can recover without giving him a chance to score on me,” he said.
Psihas (22-1) avenged Bowman’s second-place showing with an all-out attack approach against PVI’s Sammy Ojjeh. He consistently hacked his Panther counterpart in the back of the neck with his right hand and repeatedly forced Ojjeh to use the perimeter as a defensive measure.
By the time the clock read 1:22, Psihas has forced three out-of-bounds whistles.
“He kept on putting his hands out on me and stuff and so I was brushing off,” said Pshias.
When Ojjeh made his only offensive move of the match, Psihas went to a knee to block it, stood up, picked him up and slammed him to the mat. It quickly became a race against the clock for Psihas to secure the pin and he got it with 1.5 seconds remaining in the first round.
“When I get him to step and move his body, I can force the match the way I want it. Then I know it’s working for me,” he said.
Other top finishes for Battlefield included Emmitt Kelly (3-2), who came in fifth place in the 125-pound class, and 119-pounder Billy Martin (2-2), who earned eighth place.
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