Two Lone Tree freshmen wrapped up their first season of varsity wrestling on Saturday in the sectional tournament at English Valleys.

While Brody Magruder and Clemens Swaink didn’t advance to the district round, coach Brent Nelson was happy with the way they competed in their postseason matches. 

“It was neat to see them have constant improvement in the stuff we work over the weekend,” he said. “All week long, we practice certain stuff. And we go out and see it every time on the mat. They’re actually growing as a competitor, a wrestler, and as a student athlete.”

After dropping a quarterfinal match Swaink built an 11-2 lead and earned his first varsity win with a pin of Louisa-Muscatine’s Hunter Dieckman in the second period of a consolation match. Swaink made it back-to-back wins by fall with a first-period pin of fellow freshman Deacon Bird of WACO to take fifth place in the 120-pound bracket.

Magruder had a tougher bracket against juniors and seniors at 160 pounds and dropped both matches to finish sixth, but he took his shots and wrestled aggressively against the upperclassmen. 

“It's a very proud feeling to go out there and see them go all out, and work on bettering themselves," Nelson said. "Win or lose, it’s everything they’ve got.” 

At the beginning of the season, Lone Tree was set to continue the sharing agreement with Columbus/WMU that began the previous year. 

But Lone Tree’s only participant from a season ago had graduated, and no one else was making the trip to Columbus Junction to compete. 

Nelson said that there were some kids interested in going out for wrestling, but they wanted to wrestle for Lone Tree. 

“It's tough to kind of forge your own identity when you’re constantly kind of in limbo,” Nelson said. “I talked to the superintendent and we both saw eye to eye on our vision for Lone Tree — to start hammering out our own identity.”

Nelson is a former Iowa State defensive lineman, who wrestled at Cedar Rapids Kennedy before graduating in 2000. Nelson now lives in the Lone Tree area and has three children who are involved in community programs and sports. 

“It’s one of those things where you want to be able to contribute with your resources — your time or your money or things like that," he said "I’ve always been around athletics, and it was tough to stand back without wanting to help.”

While there were just two varsity competitors this year, Nelson says the future of the program is bright.

Some of the junior high wrestlers are already helping out the varsity program, volunteering as practice partners for Nelson’s freshmen. 

“I'm really excited,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of great character kids— a lot of hard workers. The quality is second to none, as far as the kids that we have coming up through the ranks in the kids club, the junior high and high school.”