23 teams converging at Mosley for wrestling tourney Friday and Saturday

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (WJHG/WECP) -Mosley wrestling is looking ahead to a big event set for Redfern Gym Friday and Saturday. It’s an annual wrestling tournament, with more than 20 teams, from our area and beyond, converging on the school’s Redfern Gym. Jeff Skipper is Mosley’s wrestling head coach.

“This is called the Panhandle Championship.” Skipper says “They’ve been doing it at Mosley for several years now. It’s a great tournament, we’re having 22 or 23 teams coming in from all over. Not just the panhandle, we call it the Panhandle but there’s a couple of schools from Georgia and so we welcome anybody that wants to come and wrestle. One of the great things is you don’t get any better wrestling kids, that aren’t so good. So when you bring in better talent you know exactly where you stand at the state level and things like that. There is a lot of wrestling over two days and it’s possible in this type of tournament that kids can get 10 matches in two days, which is pretty good.”

Arnold, Bay, Choctaw, Crestview, Bozeman Destin, Freeport, Marianna, Niceville, North Bay Haven, Rocky Bayou, Rutherford, South Walton, and Wewahitchka among the teams in our area taking part. The wrestling begins at 2 Friday afternoon and continues through Saturday night.

”We want more mat time and we want the kids to be able to wrestle more.” Mosley assistant coach and Tournament Director Jeremiah La Fountain told us. “Other tournaments that we do are called IBT which are individual bracketed tournaments. If you go oh and two and that you’re done for the day. This is a dual tournament, so you’ll get at least a solid five matches out of this tournament.”

“One of the things I love about these types of tournaments” adds coach Skipper “is that you’ve got all 14 wrestlers and the coaches, and they’re all cheering on their entire team. Where in an IBT a lot of times, you know you’re wrestling at the same time and so you know you may have one coach over here one coach over here and the kids are divide it up. But here when one kids wrestling you’re going to have all 13 other kids cheering them on which is a pretty cool thing for team building.”

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