East Meadow's Pantofel reaches final

Even if East Meadow senior Evan Pantofel didn’t walk away with the title at 170 pounds in the Nassau County Division I wrestling championships at Hofstra University last Sunday night, he certainly showed the heart of a champion. 

Pantofel, shutout for more than two periods by Plainedge’s Dan Spurgeon, who entered the match a perfect 45-0, managed to score five back points with 1:15 remaining and pull even. In fact, at the end of the flurry, Pantofel came within a breath of pinning the unbeaten Spurgeon. With eight seconds remaining, however, Spurgeon scored the deciding point on an escape and claimed the championship with a 6-5 victory.

“We tell the guys that rankings and seedings don’t mean anything,” Jets coach Chris Critchley said. “You’ve still got to go out and wrestle. It was a tied with 30 seconds left. You can’t get any closer than that.”

After dropping just his second match all season, Pantofel was still hoping to earn one of four statewide wild-card berths that will be issued in each weight class for the New York State championships at the Times Union Center in Albany on Feb. 24-25. Slated to be announced after presstime, the criteria for earning a wild-card entry includes past performances at the county tournament (Pantofel was also fifth in his weight class last season) as well as each current record in 2011-12 (Pantofel is 34-2) among other factors.

“Before the match, he believed he would beat Spurgeon,” Critchley said. “Evan didn’t seem fazed by the couple thousand people that were there. He ended up beating [other] kids who placed throughout the tournament.”