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Southampton Press In a season of frustrating losses, the Westhampton Beach wrestling team added another one to the list on Friday night, when it dropped 33-19 decision at Mount Sinai in the League VI finale for both teams. The Hurricanes fell to 3-4 in fourth place with the loss, while Mount Sinai moved to 5-2 for a third-place finish. Rocky Point was the undefeated league champion, while Harborfields finished second at 6-1. Failure to get the big points in matches won has been a problem for the Hurricanes on more than one occasion this season, and the match with Mount Sinai was more of the same. Even though Mount Sinai won just one more bout with seven wins to Westhampton Beach’s six, the 14-point difference in the final score was the result of Mount Sinai collecting more points for its individual victories. In the first six bouts of the night, Westhampton Beach rolled off five wins, but it accounted for just 16 team points as just one Hurricane earned more than three team points. After his team opened the match with a loss at 140 pounds, Paul Dilandro scored a 14-2 decision over Doug Marbillo at 145 for four team points, and while the next four matches would go to the Hurricanes, only 12 points were scored. Mike Miller won at 152, Rich Mailand at 160, Alex Mazarakis at 171 and Steve Kobus at 189 for a 16-3 Westhampton Beach advantage. The 171-pound bout saw little scoring, so when Mustang Garrett Yablonski chose down to start the third period with the match tied at 2-2, Mazarakis went for an optional start, giving a point to Yablonski for a chance to take him down for two. It looked as if that strategy was going to backfire on Mazarakis, but with five seconds to go in the match, he managed a takedown and put Yablonski on his back for two more and a 6-3 final score. Both Kobus and Miller were the victims of stalling with their opponents running out of bounds, not taking shots and failing to do anything when on the bottom. Miller was awarded one point when Ian Schneider was called for stalling, but Kobus did not receive any points when his opponent stalled. Both matches could have resulted in bigger results for the Canes had the opponents allowed for more wrestling. “They got pins, and we didn’t,” Westhampton Beach coach Paul Bass said. “Four of their seven matches were pins. We didn’t have any pins. I think a lot of the time, they went out there to stall and the ref let them. Especially with Kobus and Miller, their guys didn’t take any shots. But you do what you’re allowed to do and the ref let them.” In the heavyweight bout, Steve Yablonski, who won the Division II Suffolk County title at 171 pounds last season, tallied a 4-0 decision over Jimmy Zambik. Westhampton Beach opted to forfeit the match at 103 pounds to Jon Hoeg, the fifth-ranked wrestler in the county. Westhampton Beach’s best wrestler among the little guys, Pete Detore, is certified at 96 pounds, so generally he gives up a decent amount of weight when wrestling up at 103. “Pete’s too small to wrestle at 103. We saw that with [Mico] Wong from Amityville and Haug is even bigger,” coach Bass said. “He [Hoeg] is just too big. You’ve got a kid that’s 96 pounds and a kid going in at 108. That’s not a positive thing.” That forfeit followed by a pin at 112 pounds gave Mount Sinai its first lead since the opening bout of the match, 18-16. Mount Sinai won at 119 for three points and then Westhampton Beach’s Scott Lagoumis answered with a comefrom-behind victory in the final 30 seconds of his bout for three points to make it a 21-19 Mount Sinai lead going into the final two bouts. With Mustang Charles Haug, the county’s top-ranked wrestler at 130, coming to the mat to face sophomore Ryan Marin, things were shaky for Westhampton Beach. If the 130-pound match had an outcome of anything other than a pin or a tech fall, Westhampton Beach would still have a chance to win it in the final bout, but Hoeg stuck Marin with just 13 seconds to go in the match to seal the victory for his team. Kyle Hubbard got pinned in the final match of the night at 135 pounds for a 33-19 final. “We finished 8-5 [overall] and we should’ve won some of those, but that’s over now,” Bass said. “We have to go out and have a good league tournament. There are so many weights that are wide open.” Westhampton Beach will compete in the League VI Tournament this Saturday at Rocky Point High School. The top three wrestlers in each class qualify for the Suffolk County Tournament, which will be held on February 16 and 17 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Each county champion moves on to the state tournament which will be held in Albany the first weekend in March. Heading into the postseason, two Westhampton Beach wrestlers are ranked in the top six in the county: Steve Kobus, the top ranked wrestler at 189 and Paul Dilandro, fifth at 145 pounds.
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