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Seemingly every high school sports team was impacted by last week’s winter weather. However, the Washington High School wrestling team has had to deal with something even more impactful.

“A lot of people are battling the flu right now,” Washington coach Chris Penhollow said last weekend. “Two starters that have the flu and several other coaches are fighting it, too. Hopefully, everybody will be healthy and ready to go on Tuesday.”

The Pam Pack had two regular-season matches at Ayden-Grifton before Wednesday’s Eastern Plains Conference individuals at North Pitt High School. Wednesday’s wrestling gives individual bragging rights for athletes in each weight class on the varsity and junior varsity level. After that will be the announcement of the dual team wrestling playoffs and the rest of the postseason.

“That is mainly just designed for the boys for bragging rights to see who is all-conference and the number one guy in the conference in their weight class,” Penhollow said. “So a lot of the other sports, they’ll get together as coaches and they’ll vote for all-conference.

“We kind of do it a little different. If you show up and you beat everybody in your weight class, you are awarded a gold medal and you are, I guess, what you would call first-team all-conference. So it’s just a way to see who the best kid is in the conference in each weight class.”

The dual team playoff pairings are released on Thursday with competition starting Saturday. The individual weight class competitions follow after that. The Pam Pack are hopeful for a high seeding, a chance to host a first- and second-round dual team meet and the chance to face Seaforth again in the Class 2-A Eastern Regional finals. Washington lost to Seaforth in last season’s East Regional final. The two schools are the top-ranked among the schools in the east in 2-A.

It’s hopefully another successful chapter for the program, which has traveled from the Charlotte area to the Outer Banks to wrestle this season, facing top-quality talent to prepare them for this moment.

“We’ve traveled all over, tried to see the toughest competition we can see to get prepared for the playoffs,” Penhollow said. So we get through this week, and our sport is a little different. 

“We’ve never gotten that far (state finals). We’ve made it to the Eastern Finals several times. Last year, we made it there and lost to Seaforth by eight. It’s looking like that’s the team to beat in the east again this year. They only had one senior last year, so they’ve got pretty much that entire team back.”

And, like every other school, last week’s snow prevented the Ayden-Grifton matches from happening and disrupted practices and normal routines within the team. Team members have worked out on their own and as a group away from school just to keep in game-day shape.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime type of snow that you’re not used to getting,” Penhollow said. “And we only get snow if we’re lucky once a year. And this was kind of weird in that regard, too.

“So that sort of makes it interesting. I don’t remember ever having where we had a whole week of school pretty much canceled.”