EDMONDS — At 7 p.m. Friday, Arlington and Edmonds-Woodway, the respective Wesco 3A North and South champions as well as two of the top five 3A wrestling teams in the state, will square off in a highly anticipated dual meet for Snohomish County bragging rights.
The fourth-ranked Eagles and fifth-ranked Warriors have been the two best teams in the area all season, and Arlington coach Rick Iversen and his Edmonds-Woodway counterpart, Brian Alfi, went to considerable lengths to give their squads a prime-time matchup before the postseason begins next weekend.
“I really enjoy competing against Rick, and we visit with each other often in the offseason,” Alfi said. “We both thought it would be great if we could end the season against each other, but we didn’t think it was possible until right before the season started.”
A team scheduled to face Edmonds-Woodway in a dual meet backed out, freeing up an opening in the Warriors’ WIAA-maximum 16 outings for the season.
Arlington backed out of the Mount Baker Invitational over the holiday break to clear an opening in its schedule, and the athletic directors took care of the rest.
“We knew that Edmonds-Woodway was going to have a great team and that we were going to be as good as we’ve been in a long time,” Arlington athletic director Tom Roys said. “This is an opportunity to showcase both programs as well as wrestling in our area in general.”
The match will be held in Edmonds-Woodway’s gym, which has approximately 750 seats. Alfi said hard-backed chairs will be brought in for additional seating, and there will be standing room as well.
Iversen said Arlington will bring a full rooter bus of students to the match, which should be a tightly contested affair given the overall caliber of both teams and the fact that their strengths are in different weight classes.
Arlington will bring 10 wrestlers ranked in 3A by WashingtonWrestlingReport.com to Edmonds-Woodway on Friday, while the Warriors will counter with seven.
Predicting the outcome of a dual meet is tough because wrestlers can compete at a different weight class than where they weigh in, depending on how their coaches choose to deploy their resources. Modern wrestling coaches are legendary for trying to handicap dual meets on paper before the action starts on the mat.
“I used to handicap things a little bit more when I was a younger coach, but now I really just try to figure out how to put us in the best position to win seven matches,” Alfi said. “If we can do that, we should have a pretty good chance of pulling something out.”
In a testament to the importance of the event, Edmonds-Woodway’s wrestlers will be wearing the black singlets they reserve for tournament championship matches.
“Our guys feel like this is a finals atmosphere,” Alfi said.
There will be plenty of entertainment off the mat as well.
Everett High School wrestling coach Brien Elliott, also a DJ with Otto-Matic Mobile Music, will provide music to get the crowd moving, and the Edmonds-Woodway cheer squad will perform as part of a halftime show after seven bouts.
Iversen insisted that it won’t be the stars who decide the outcome Friday night.
“Each of us have three or four kids that we think could be in the state finals, and each of us have a half-dozen more that we think could score points at state and maybe place. That second group will be the ones that decide it,” Iversen said. “The only thing that would surprise me is if there were no surprises.”
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