Lincoln-Way tops Schaumburg for IWCOA Girls Dual Team state championship

By Gary Larsen for the IWCOA

Saturday’s IWCOA Girls’ State Dual Team Championship at Hoffman Estates crowned the first dual-format girls’ team state champion in Illinois history.

That history belongs to Lincoln-Way.

Program history will show that it was Zoe Dempsey’s pin in the final match of the state title dual against Schaumburg that gave Lincoln-Way a 40-38 win, and the first girls dual-format team state title ever in Illinois.

“That’s storybook — our best wrestler with a chance to put it away,” Lincoln-Way coach Josh Napier said.
“It’s so exciting,” Lincoln-Way senior Riley Cooney said. “I’m so happy and we have worked so hard these past weeks for this. I’m so proud of this team. A good amount of our lineup are first-year wrestlers and they’ve been so good.”

Dempsey’s pin capped a comeback that sent Lincoln-Way’s girls into a frenzy: hugging, hollering, and grins from ear-to-ear always mark a state title win, and Dempsey was engulfed by a mob of deliriously happy teammates after her pin handed them a dual team state crown.
The two teams tied 7-7 in matches won.

“It was just two solid all-around teams going at it,” Dempsey said. “I liked the energy we had today. Nobody gave up. We were losing pretty bad to Schaumburg, but nobody was giving up.

“I think this just sets a standard for every girl that’s coming into Lincoln-Way, that we’re the best.”

It may have been team captain Dempsey playing the ultimate hero, riding up on her white horse to save the day, but there had better be room up on that horse for co-captain Cooney.

It’s arguable that what Cooney did against Schaumburg was the most important match wrestled all day by any wrestler — and it was a loss.

Cooney bumped up in weight to 130 against Schaumburg and lost 1-0 to Isabella Rivas. In 32 duals across hundreds of matches wrestled among 16 teams on Saturday, Rivas-Cooney was the only match that ended in a 1-0 decision.

“Riley lost 1-0 but I don’t think she knows how important that match was,” Napier said. “I know she wanted to win but she’s wrestling up and if she got pinned, we lose that dual.”

Trailing Schaumburg 38-18 with four matches remaining, a forfeit win at 235 for Lincoln-Way’s Riley DePolo made it 38-24. And that set the stage for the heart of Napier’s lineup.

An 8-0 major decision win at 100 pounds from Lincoln-Way’s Monica Alvarez made it 38-28. Teammate Emily Peyton followed with a pin at 105 to make it 38-34, setting the stage for Dempsey’s heroics at 110.
“We knew where we might lose some matches but we like to call our little 100 to 120 wrestlers ‘murderer’s row’,” Napier said. “We know we’ve got tough ones there and we needed to win all three. They got it done – two seniors and a junior, girls that have been with me for three or four years now.”
Schaumburg’s wrestlers and coaching staff were naturally disappointed in the loss, but positivity still carried the day for the Saxons.

“Hats off the Lincoln Way,” Schaumburg coach Matt Gruszka said. “They have really come on and they had a hell of a tournament. They wrestled very tough. We bled some points where maybe we shouldn’t have but that’s how it goes.

“The IWCOA did a fantastic job putting this together and giving these girls a chance like this. It was awesome.”

The IWCOA has hosted girls individual state tournaments for years, prior to the IHSA making girls wrestling a sport for the 2022-23 season. The organization threw its hat in the ring for a dual-format state tournament for girls in Illinois for the first time this year.

IWCOA president Rob Porter explained the rationale for the tournament:

“Some of the coaches around the state started talking about it and it just kind of evolved from that,” Porter said. “To know we could do it as an invitational during the season and not have it affect regionals or sectionals, so the girls could have high-level competition and not have it affect their individual opportunities — that was a big factor.”

When the day was over, Schaumburg’s Hope Zerafa-Lazarevic didn’t dwell on her team’s loss to Lincoln-Way, opting instead to see numerous silver linings in a great day for girls wrestling in Illinois.
Zerafa-Lazarevic showed as much class, maturity and perspective in defeat as you might ever get from a high school student-athlete.

“I am just so grateful to the IWCOA for hosting this and giving us this platform,” Zerafa-Lazarevic said. “The IHSA said that we couldn’t do it and I think we proved them wrong today. We all worked really, really hard today and I’m proud of everybody who stepped on a mat, whether it was my team or not. Everyone wrestled hard and you saw some great matches today.”

Pins from Lincoln-Way’s Aubrey Barnes (115) and Sadie Sparks (125) bookended a pin by Schaumburg’s Madyson Meyer (120) to start the state championship dual. Schaumburg took a 15-12 lead on Isabella Rivas’ 1-0 win at 130 and a pin from Sharon Olorunfemi (135).

Lincoln-Way took an 18-15 lead on an Ella Giertuga pin at 140, but Schaumburg reeled off pins from Zerafa-Lazarevic (145), Shreya Gosain (155) and Nadia Razzak (190), and a tech fall win from Alya Razzak (170) in building its 38-18 lead.

DePolo, Alvarez, and Peyton set the stage for Dempsey, and her second-period pin to win a team state title. Lincoln-Way is young and currently banged up, but Napier and assistant coaches Skylar Novak, Alan Durham, Eric Balluff, Bill Guide and Matt Schedin saw girls up and down the lineup got it done through six duals wrestled Saturday.“Aubrey Barnes wrestled out of her mind, and she’s getting better every time she wrestles,” Napier said. “Sierra Heatherly is a first year wrestler with a bad back and she also pulled out some big wins for us.

“It was very well run by Hoffman Estates and Leo Clark, and the IWCOA did an amazing thing for these girls. I hope this can spark the IHSA conversation going forward.”

Lincoln-Way improved to 11-0 in duals with the win in the finals.
“It was cool to hear that we were going to state but now that we’re actually here and we actually won it — it’s so exciting,” Cooney said.

“At the beginning of the season in our first tournaments, a lot of our girls didn’t really know what to expect or what it was about. But they’ve all worked their way up and they’re all becoming more aggressive attacking their opponents and it’s really good to see.”

Zerafa-Lazarevic was similarly proud of her program’s performance.

“We are so grateful to our coaches -(Matt) Gruszka, (Jake) Hughes, and (Jason) Bonilla — all of them scouted, they made spreadsheets of all of these teams, so we were really ready for our action. Every girl was ready.

“We are definitely big dual fans. The reason we do well in individual tournaments is because we really do think of the team; we think of saving team points. So a tournament like this kind of fell right into our skill set as a team. We think about going for team points all the time and it’s just a really good tight knit group of girls.”

Lincoln-Way went 3-0 in pool play, topping Phoenix Military Academy (56-24), West Aurora (54-29) and Batavia (45-33), in a dual that went 8-6 in matches won for Lincoln-Way, which then won 8 matches in a 41-33 win over Edwardsville in a championship quarterfinal dual.

Lincoln-Way earned another 8-6 edge in matches won in its state semifinal win over Hoffman Estates, winning 47-36 to reach the state title mat.

Schaumburg also went 3-0 in opening pool play with wins over Morton (54-27), Homewood-Flossmoor (60-21), and host Hoffman Estates (48-27). The Saxons then won 48-33 in a state quarterfinal dual against West Aurora, before posting an 8-6 edge in matches won and a 43-36 victory over the District 230 team, consisting of wrestlers from Andrew, Carl Sandburg, and Stagg.

District 230 went on to finish third in state with a 60-24 win over Hoffman Estates; Edwardsville placed fifth with a 47-33 win over West Aurora; and Minooka placed seventh with a 54-29 win over Geneseo.

In the consolation bracket, Batavia took first place with a 42-42 tiebreaker win over DeKalb; Huntley won the third-place dual 48-35 over JS Morton; Phoenix Military won the fifth-place dual 48-36 over Lockport, and Homewood-Flossmoor took seventh in a 46-36 win over Rickover Naval Academy.