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The Trygg Memorial, the oldest currently run wrestling tournament in the New Orleans metropolitan area, will be held on Saturday, December 1st, at Grace King High School in Metairie.  This is the 29th time the tournament will be held.  Wrestling will conclude on Saturday.  The tournament has been held consistently since 1983, aside from 2002 when it was cancelled due to the death of wrestling official Wayne Schmidt.

Past team tournament champions include St. Paul (2011), and Rummel (2005-8), both of which will be competing this weekend.  Joing the Wolves, Raiders and host Irish will be teams from South Walton High School in Florida, De la Salle, John Ehret, Helen Cox, Parkview Baptist and Destrehan, to name a few.  Former Grace King coach Sam Sara named the tournament for Coach Trygg's sudden death in 1982.  Sara, also a member of the Louisiana Wrestling Hall of Fame, has a tournament named in his honor on the weekend of December 7^th and 8^th at Rummel.  Roberto Furtado took over the reins of the Grace King wrestling program in 2000 and continued holding the tournament.

The tournament was first held in 1983 and named in honor of former East Jefferson High School wrestler and coach George Trygg, who unexpectedly died in 1982.  Trygg won state championships in 1967 and 1968, and coached the Warriors to a Division I team championship in 1978.   Trygg was posthumously inducted into the Louisiana Chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2008.

1968 103 lb. state champion 1978 Division I state champion coach

The tournament's oustanding wrestler, determined by the coaches, will receive the Christian J. Romig "Warrior Award,"” award.  Romig wrestled for and graduated from King in 2005.  A U.S. Army specialist and scout, he was killed by an IED in Afghanistan on January 5th, 2011 at 24. The "Brad Phillips Award" will be given to the wrestler who demonstrates outstanding sportsmanship during the tournament. The individual weight class winners will receive sweatshirts, and trophies will be awarded to wrestlers who finish 1st-3rd. Team trophies will be awarded to the teams which place 1st and 2nd.

The participating coaches will honor one of their own with the Ray Gremillion “Coaching Distinction Award.”  Gremillion wrestled for Louisiana wrestling icon Brother Melchior Polowy at Holy Cross in the 1940’s and in over a quarter-of-a-century of coaching built teams at East Jefferson and Bonnabel that won state championships in 1966 and 1988, respectively.  In 2006 he was inducted into the Louisiana Chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame with a “Lifetime Service to Wrestling” Award.  Coach Gremillion passed away in 2011 at age 81. Grace King Head Coach and tournament director Roberto Furtado won state championships for Gremillion in 1982 and 84.

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© 2012 by Martin Muller

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