By Josh McFadden | [email protected]

Utah Valley University was a busy campus Feb. 13 and 14. And if you enjoy wrestling, this was the place to be. 

The Class 6A and 5A state championships took place during these two days, brining numerous teams throughout the northern part of the state all to one location. In the 6A ranks, Bingham held its own, placing seventh with 107 points. Fellow Region 4 team Pleasant Grove won the championship, its eighth in a nine-year span.

Bingham did just enough to finish in the top half of the standings. It had 12 more points than eighth-place American Fork and trailed sixth-place Fremont by 28 points. 

Though the Miners were distantly behind Pleasant Grove at the top, one Bingham wrestler brought home top individual honors. In the 113-pound weight class, Marco Herrera brought home a trophy for the Miners by defeating Layton’s Aidan Harris 9-1 in the finals. Herrera was dominant throughout the tournament. After going 38-2 during the regular season, he won his first three matches by fall, two of them in less than three minutes. 

Another Miner, Brevan Butterfield had a stellar outing in the tournament. He couldn’t quite reach the final but got all the way to the third-place match, coming up victorious over Josef Mecham of Cyprus 11-4 to claim third place in the 195-pound division. Butterfield lost his second match but then won four in a row to claim third place. 

Bingham’s Chris Patterson also got to the third-place matchup. The 285-pound competitor lost in his final match to finish in fourth place. At 145 pounds, the Miners’ Jaxon Wardle battled hard and finished fifth among all wrestlers in that division. Patterson easily won his first match, pinning his opponent in just 39 seconds. After losing in the next round, he reeled off three more victories—all by fall in less than two minutes—before losing in the third-place match.

Two more Bingham wrestlers earned points for the Miners by finishing in sixth place. Kam Moss, at 152 pounds, and Isaac Ngatuvai, at 220 pounds contributed to the Miners’ total and seventh-place efforts. Moss got off to a great start by winning his first two matches. He then dropped two in a row to fall to sixth. Meanwhile, Ngatuvai dropped his opener but then had three wins in a row before bowing out in his final matchup, losing by fall in 1:36.

Bingham made a slight improvement from last season when it finished eighth at the 6A tournament. 

On Feb. 2, at the divisional meets, Bingham placed fifth in Division B with 228.5 points. Herrera, Moss and Butterfield each won their respective weight classes. The Miners were just 14 points behind fourth-place Davis.