After beating Emmaus in a close regular season dual meet, Freedom came into last week’s District 11 team tournament match up against Emmaus with confidence.

However, the Hornets earned an emotional win in the first bout and led from there on before winning 41-20 to knock the Patriots out of the tournament.

“I’m disappointed,” said Patriot head coach Brandon Hall. “From top to bottom I don’t think we wrestled our best tonight. I think every one of these kids would echo that, as would the assistant coaches.

“On the flip side, I commend the Emmaus program. They came out tonight ready to wrestle and they were prepared to wrestle us. Kudos to the kids and coaching staff for coming out prepared and ready to go.”

Freedom’s Ryan Deloach opened the match at 182. He had a 1-0 lead from early in the second period until late in the third. But when Patrick Zerpa got an escape and take down in the final 10 seconds to win the match, the Hornet bench went wild and fed off the momentum the rest of the way.

The Hornets Dan Oberle earned a first-period pin in the next match and from there the Patriots were struggling to come back the rest of the night.

“Two matches, 182 and 195 were emotionally crushing for the team,” said Hall. “Those were two spots we got wins last time. We felt like it was a good place for us to start. We felt confident that we could get four wins to start, with bonus in some of them. It didn’t work out. That was a 15-point swing in the match. We got a win at 182 last time and got a win at 195. Now we gave up a loss and a pin. That was the dual meet.”

Evan Callahan earned a first-period pin at 220 before Mario McIntyre’s 7-5 decision win tied the score at 9-9.

Emmaus pulled ahead by 10 points before Jacob Garcia pinned his opponent in 10 seconds and Ben Huber won an 8-3 decision to make it 19-18 in favor of Emmaus.

But the Pates won just one more bout. Tommy Bonilla earned a 6-4 decision win at 152.

“We tried to make some moves down between 120, 126 and 132….to see if we could change things around there from last time,” said Hall. “It just didn’t quite work out the way we thought it would.”

Freedom will have a couple weeks off before competing in the District 11 Class AAA individual tournament on Feb. 26-27.