The Star Valley Braves are in the middle of yet another excellent wrestling season after winning another state title last season in the 3A, the team moved up to 4A this season and hasn’t missed a single beat along the way. Head Coach Eddie Clark joined Aaron and Dahl over the phone for a quick interview before the Ron Thon begins today and discussed what the tournament is gonna look like to his best estimation.

The Braves will enter the tournament with a full lineup apart from heavyweight where they will be open for this tournament as their hopeful end of season heavyweight recovers from injury. Coach Clark says he is really wanting to see from this tournament how his team will stack up heading into state with the rest of the top teams in Wyoming as the team has spent a lot of time traveling and facing a lot of schools from across the borders in Utah and Idaho and it will be nice for the team to get a good solid look again at the best of the best from their own state.

Coach Clark says while the lack of Freshmen in this years class could be construed as a bad thing occasionally for the future, one of the underrated benefits is having a team so heavy in seniors the team has a lot of continuity this year and for meetings the team can get everyone in the same room which is helpful. The Braves are currently ranked by Trackwrestling as the 5th ranked team in 4A this year for wrestling but with this Ron Thon coming up the Braves have a great chance to improve that ranking just before state.

Another huge benefit for the Braves heading into this is the sheer number of equally impressive tournaments they have put under their belt this season leading up to the Ron Thon, Coach Clark claiming they have already wrestled several “just as hard” tournaments before this weekend and need to remember that. The main reason he wants his team to keep that in mind is as he claims “they sometimes make it bigger than it is and make things harder for themselves” in that the team maybe thinks of the tournament as such a big deal it can have the potential to psych themselves out.

The Ron Thon can be tracked at trackwrestling.com and the full interview with Coach Clark can be listened to below: