SALINA – Even as recently as two weeks ago, Andale wrestling coach Doug Eck wasn’t sure if his team believed it had what it took to win the Class 4A state championship.
 
“I think with some of the injuries we’ve had, maybe there was a little doubt in the boys’ minds,” Eck said, noting the Indians lost their starting 120 and 126-pounder in the final month of the season.
 
When Andale went out and won its Class 4A regional last week, however, the switch flipped. And suddenly the belief was not only there, but firmly entrenched after the Indians finished ahead of No. 1 Rose Hill and Augusta.
 
“When we won that regional tournament, I think it opened their eyes a little bit,” Eck said. “They thought, ‘Hey, we can do this.’ You just have to keep the nose to the grindstone and keep doing what you’re doing.”

After regionals, the only doubters were outside the program with the Indians still slotted behind Rose Hill in the final KWCA rankings.

But this weekend, Andale left no doubt.
 
When Andale won the program’s first state title in 2021, the Indians bounced back from a rough start and stormed back to win the crown by 2.5 points over Chanute, Hector Serratos’ victory in the 126-pound championship clinching the crown. In winning its second state title in three years on Saturday at Tony’s Pizza Events Center, Andale needed no such late heroics.
 
In fact, their performance on Friday pretty much dropped the hammer on the rest of the field and all but locked up the title.
 
Andale went 7-0 in its quarterfinal matches and then advanced five wrestlers to the finals, finishing Day 1 with 143 points. When things were all said and done on Saturday – Andale getting individual titles from two of its five finalists – the Indians finished 16.5 points clear of runner-up Rose Hill, which also had a pair of individual champions from its four finalists.
 
And Trent Cox, who serves as co-head coach with Eck, pin-pointed exactly what keyed Andale’s surge to the lead. Of the 27 wins the Indians recorded in the tournament, 20 came via pin, leading to critical bonus points.
 
“All the pins helped us out (Friday),” Cox said of the 18 pins Andale picked up on Day 1. “It kept us in the lead and allowed us to stretch it out a bit, getting those bonus points. That’s big.”
 
Just as quickly, Eck turned the credit for those outcomes right back onto Cox, who starred for the Indians as a two-time champion in 2006 and 2008.
 
“Every week, Trent goes top to bottom on these guys and we spend a lot of time on getting bonus points and it pays off,” Eck said. “We looked at our stats the past few years and ever since Trent showed up here, our pins, turns and near-falls have gone through the roof.”
 
Three Indians – AJ Furnish (138), Isaiah Wilson (175) and Riley Marx (215) -- pinned their way into the finals on Friday while Andale’s other two finalists – Owen Eck (144) and Jonah Meyer (150) – each had two.
 
The only non-pin Owen Eck recorded in the tournament also was arguably the marquee match of the tourney as well, facing off against fellow two-time state champion Tucker Cell of Abilene in the 144-pound semifinals. The two had clashed twice earlier in the season with Eck dominating both meetings.
 
Though the semifinal was a bit closer, the outcome was the same with Eck controlling the bulk of the match in taking a 10-5 victory. It made his championship match on Saturday against Tonganoxie freshman Brady Martin seem perhaps a bit anti-climactic, even though Eck never treated it that way.
 
“The nerves were still there,” Eck said. “It’s a big match, so it’s always the same no matter who you’re facing. But I was confident.”
 
As he should have been. Eck entered the state tournament as the lone undefeated wrestler in Class 4A and finished it the same way. He wasted no time in making quick work of Martin, taking the freshman down, letting him up and taking him down again before finally working a pin with 48 seconds left in the first period.
 

 
That capped a 46-0 season for Eck and now has him three-fourths of the way to his desired goal of becoming the first four-time state champion in Andale history. He joined Mike Dawes (1994, 1995, 1996) and Serratos (2019, 2020, 2021) as three-time champions for the Indians.
 
“That’s been the plan,” he said of becoming a four-time champ. “I don’t know (if I thought I’d do it), I just go out and wrestle.”
 

 
Eck was joined as an individual champion this year by Furnish, whose journey to the top of the podium has been anything but an easy one.
 
Furnish missed his entire freshman season with a back injury. Healthy as a sophomore, he finished fourth at state at 132 in helping Andale to the team title.
 
Last year, the injury bug struck again, this time a torn labrum in his right shoulder wiping out his junior season.
 
“It was pretty tough on me,” Furnish said. “Even coming back the first tournaments I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted. It was a climb for sure.”
 
Furnish sat just 6-6 two weeks into the season, but saw things take off from there. He only lost three more times the rest of the season – two coming to 5A state champion Adam Maki of Andover and the other to an out-of-state wrestler.
 
After pinning his way into the finals, Furnish had his hands full with Chanute’s Trey Dillow. The two sandwiched scoreless first and third periods around a brief flurry of activity in the second that saw Furnish mix a takedown in between two Dillow escapes.
 
The match went to overtime tied 2-2 before Furnish scored the title-winning takedown 22 seconds into the extra period.
 

 
“I was very determined,” Furnish said. “It was a dream of mine to win a state title and that’s what I was hunting for. It’s just amazing to me. I still can’t believe it.”
 
Going 2-for-2 with titles to start the championship round, the Indians couldn’t keep the run going as Meyer, Wilson and Marx all tumbled in their title tilts.
 
Meyer was tied 3-3 with Chanute’s Ty Leedy in the third period before Leedy got a takedown midway through the period and held on for a 5-4 win. Two weights later, Wilson could never get any offense going in a 3-0 loss to Winfield’s Kody Brenn.
 
Marx ran into his kryptonite in his finals, losing for the fifth time this season to Rose Hill’s Bronx Wood, getting pinned midway through the second period.
 
But with Ian Aouad adding a third-place finish at 165 and Tristen Cox adding a fifth at 106 during the consolation rounds on Saturday, the Indians already had done more than enough to capture the ultimate prize.
 
Wilson, in particular, played a bit of the hero’s role.
 
“Ian Aouad is a grinder for us every day and we felt he was dialed in and when he got knocked off (in the semifinals by Clay Center’s Brett Loader), the team got down a little bit,” Doug Eck said. “But then Isaiah comes up next and pins the Goodland kid to made the finals and the spirit shot right back up and that was huge for us.”
 
Eck said it was hard to compare the two teams titles his team has now won in the past three years. But he got emotional when talking about this year’s championship.
 
“They’re pretty equal,” he said. “In 2021, the group of seniors that year was really wanting it and the first day didn’t go great for us. We fought through the backside and ending up winning it by a narrow margin and that was special.
 
“But this one, there’s a lot of things that have gone on that people don’t know about. These guys lost a good friend here a month ago, Wyatt Sobba, in a car wreck. Lost a couple kids to injury. But these guys stuck with it, worked hard, wrestled hard and here we are.”