Down to the wire
Navajo Times | Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi Shiprock’s Logan Charley (top) awaits the referee’s whistle during the Class 4A 195-pound championship match. Charley took his opponent into four overtimes before winning by a fall in eight minutes and 18 seconds.
Shipock’s Logan Charley takes state after 4 OTs
Navajo Times | Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi
Shiprock’s Logan Charley (top) awaits the referee’s whistle during the Class 4A 195-pound championship match. Charley took his opponent into four overtimes before winning by a fall in eight minutes and 18 seconds.
RIO RANCHO
In eight minutes and 18 seconds Logan Charley’s dream came true.
The Shiprock High School senior started wrestling when he was just four years old and now, 14 years later, he is a state champion.
Charley defeated Robertson’s Darian Duran in four overtimes for the fall at eight minutes and 18 seconds in the 195-pound weight class at the New Mexico Class 4A state wrestling tournament.
It was a hard-fought battle that Charley said he’s waited the last 14 years for.
“It means everything,” he said. “It was do or die, win or lose, it was knowing that it’s my last year of high school wrestling, knowing that it’s my last season; just having that knowledge in the back of my head.”
The two went scoreless in one period, tied for 1-1 in the second and tied again 2-2 after the third period. They went back and fourth for three overtimes and in the fourth, once Charley got into a good position and rolled Duran on his back for the fall, he executed.
He said the match was purely mind over matter.
“I was making him play my game,” Charley said. “It was waiting for him, not playing his game.”
In two days of competition, Charley worked his way through the champion’s bracket. He won his first three matches by falls and in the semifinals he earned a 5-1 decision to wrestle in the finals.
He had his eyes on the prize well before he and his teammates made the nearly four-hour drive to the state tournament.
Charley finished in second place last season and qualified, but didn’t place as a sophomore in the 182-pound weight class.
Shiprock head coach Ben Frazier said it took a village to get Charley on the podium, but it took heart to get him to go home a champion.
“Both coach Fraziers, his brother Raygen Charley (who placed second at 145-pounds in 2014), those guys are the ones that were beating him up all the way to now, and everybody else that pushed him. There’s a lot of people that gave him this opportunity and I’m happy that he had those people cross his path and help him accomplish being a state champion,”
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Highway 264,
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