CLEVELAND — Mannford’s girls didn’t just show up at the Joe Cole/ Cleveland Classic on December 18 — they walked out as the tournament runner-up, stacking 80.5 team points and finishing second out of 21 teams, right on the heels of champion Claremore (90) and just ahead of a tight pack that included Berryhill and Wagoner (77 each) and Tecumseh (75).
In a meet that was deep enough to make every advancement matter, the Lady Pirates weren’t buoyed by one hot bracket so much as they were lifted by a full lineup of scorers doing the hard thing: wrestling late, wrestling again, and wrestling with purpose.
The most electric headline belonged at 135 pounds, where Jayden Jenkins won the title in emphatic fashion. Jenkins pinned Hilldale’s Lynly Flud in just 53 seconds in the first-place match, a finish that didn’t just put gold around her neck — it dropped a hammer on the team race in the way only a championship fall can.
In a sport where time is the currency, Jenkins cashed hers in early and loudly.
Mannford also got a pair of placewinners at 120, and it came with the kind of bracket irony only wrestling can deliver: the Lady Pirates had to go through each other to climb the podium. Kylin Reed and Zoey Henley finished third and fourth, respectively, and their medal round ended with Reed earning a fall over Henley in 2:53 in the third-place match.
That’s a tough kind of teammateon- teammate moment — somebody has to win and somebody has to shake it off — but it’s also the clearest evidence of depth, the kind that wins team trophies when the room is crowded.
At 125, Shelby Glassco turned in one of the day’s most decisive consolation performances. Glassco placed third and did it with authority, winning the third-place match by technical fall, 20–4, over Chandler’s McKinley Miller.In the language of wrestling, that’s not simply winning — it’s controlling the entire conversation, from the first whistle to the final count.
At 130, Peyton Hightower also climbed onto the podium, taking third place with a fall in 2:47 over Skiatook’s Jada Palmer in the third-place match.Those third-place matches are where tournaments are often decided in the margins; they’re where fatigue shows up, where focus wobbles, and where a team either collects points or watches them walk away. Mannford collected them.
Even the brackets that didn’t end with medals still mattered to the team story. At 105, Hannah Adour finished fourth, advancing deep enough in a tough weight to contribute to the overall runner-up push before falling in 37 seconds to Berryhill’s Grace Halbert in the third-place match.That placement, even without the win at the end, still counted in the team chase — proof that a tournament trophy is usually built as much from the hard finishes as the highlight ones.
Put it all together and Mannford’s second-place finish reads like a blueprint for how programs win in December: a champion who slams the door, multiple placers who keep scoring across weights, and enough depth to survive the chaos of a 21-team field. Claremore took the top spot, but Mannford left Cleveland with something every coach recognizes immediately — the kind of full-lineup performance that travels, the kind that becomes a standard, and the kind that makes the next tournament feel a little less like a question mark and a little more like a destination.