Leah Stewart runner-up to defending state champion at ‘Donnybrook’ girls wrestling tournament

Press Staff Report

CORALVILLE — The days of becoming the “undisputed” state champion of your weight bracket in girls wrestling in Iowa have come to pass as the state has adopted a two-class system for this current season.

But that’s not going to deprive Charles City senior and returning state-medalist Leah Stewart from possibly facing the defending 190-pound single-class champion from last season’s State Girls Wrestling Championships — senior Libby Dix, whose school (Mount Vernon) was right at the dividing point separating the Class 1A schools from the Class 2A schools with the Mustangs assigned to the former (1A) like Charles City.

Whether they cross paths during the Class 1A section of the forthcoming state tournament remains to be seen, but the two wrestlers faced each other in the championship match of their 190-pound bracket during Friday’s session of the Dan Gable Girls Donnybrook at Xtreme Arena in Coralville … the site of the last two sanctioned state girls tournaments.

There, Dix improved to 14-0 when she pinned Stewart with 2 seconds left in the second period.

Stewart had advanced to the championship match after recording a pair of fall victories and a technical-fall victory during the tourney’s preliminary rounds on Thursday.

For Stewart, it was her first loss of the season (8-1).

Charles City placed around the middle of the 30-team field with 134.5 team points with Stewart’s runner-up performance accounting for 37.5 of that total.

The Comets got another 31 team points from senior 155-pounder Destiny Kolheim, who advanced to the consolation championship match where she lost to Decorah junior Lauren Luzum by way of pinfall at the 2:47 mark.

Sophomore Sophia Calpito accumulated 21 points for the Comets while winning a total of three bouts in the 100-pound championship and consolation brackets.

Like Stewart, Kolheim and Calpito are returning state-qualifiers for Charles City.