LA PINE — When La Pine wrestling coach Aaron Flack gathered the team at the end of practice days before Christmas, he reiterated to his squad that the goal over the next couple of months is to bring home another team state title.

The Hawks have been Class 3A’s top program the past three years with a pair of team titles — 2019 and spring 2021 — and a fifth-place finish in 2020. And Flack said this year’s team might be the best of the bunch.

“Every season the past few seasons we have put ourselves in position to be (in state title contention) and that is what we expect,” Flack said. “This is probably one of the best teams that we have had from top to bottom.”

Thus far in the first month of the season, La Pine has had some impressive showings at tournaments with a win at the Culver Invitational and a second-place finish to 6A Mountain View at the Adrian Irwin Memorial Tournament. The Hawks girls team won each of those tournaments.

La Pine has four wrestlers that have yet to lose a match this season. Senior Dylan Mann, the reigning 132-pound state champion, has won all 16 of his matches. Junior Tyson Flack, hoping to repeat as the 106-pound state champion, has yet to lose any of his 13 matches.

For the La Pine girls, Reine Bissember and Kira Kerr have a combined 17-0 record and Julietta Leal’s only loss came in the championship match against Bissember at the Adrian Irwin Memorial Tournament.

Flack said that there might be a couple of freshmen in the mix to claim state titles the final weekend of February.

“A lot of these guys have been wrestling a long time and are coming off a state championship,” Flack said. “It is something that they expect to do. They expect to be the top dog. I talk to them about having a target on their back and that everyone is going to come after us. But they like the position that they are in and are working hard.”

This winter, the Hawks will travel farther than in years past to challenge themselves. They will travel to Reno, Nevada, to compete in the Sierra Nevada Classic that includes teams from Oregon, California and Nevada; the Rollie Lane Invitational in Nampa, Idaho, which also draws teams from around the West; as well as the Reser Tournament of Champions in Hillsboro.

“When you travel and wrestle against these big, well-known teams, you have to bring it,” said Kerr, a runner-up at the state tournament last June. “All the divisions are going to be there and this is our chance to show that we can compete with bigger division schools.”

Traveling to these prestigious, out-of-state tournaments has been a desire of the La Pine wrestlers for the past couple of years. Finally, the Hawks will have a chance to compete in them.

“We have been begging Flack to go to these tournaments since my freshman year,” Mann said. “We want to go to these out-of-state tournaments that (Oregon’s top teams) are going to. And we feel we have kids that can compete at that level. It is a big opportunity, especially for us juniors and seniors who want to wrestle in college.”

The expectations this winter could not be higher for the Hawks, but they are exactly where they want them to be. The self-motivated wrestlers are no strangers to working to reach their goals.

After all, this is a group that was not allowed to practice as a team for two weeks last spring because it had to quarantine in the middle of the season. And still, the Hawks proved to be 3A’s top team.

“The goals are there, the goals are high,” Flack said. “We just have to try and reach those goals.”