Austin Bronco Campsey, a 15-year-old Pierson High School sophomore who wrestles at 108 pounds for East Hampton High’s team, on Sunday became the first champion Bonac has produced in almost 40 years.
Ethan Mitchell, East Hampton’s coach, said that “it wasn’t a question of whether Bronco was going to win a county championship, but when. He’s an incredibly hard worker, a very focused individual. He only gave up 2 points the whole tournament, and the fact that he ran through everybody at the counties shows you how much more ambitious his goals are.”
“People have no idea how hard it is,” Bronco’s father, Beau, said during a conversation Monday morning at Poxabogue’s Fairway restaurant, where he, his wife, Corey, and their son were having pancake breakfasts. “There are only 13 county champions.”
Bonac’s last county champion was Eric Kaufman, an East Hampton High School Hall of Famer who won a county title at 93 pounds in 1987.
The elder Campsey, who wrestled at 112 pounds on Jim Stewart-coached East Hampton teams in the early 1990s, never made it to the county tournament, he said. He knew that Bronco, who began to wrestle at the age of 5 in KID wrestling sessions that Beau revived, had it in him to advance that far, and further: Bronco is to compete in the state tourney at MVP Arena in Albany on Feb. 28 and
March 1. The younger Campsey said he aims to win it.
When asked what his son’s chief strengths were, Beau pointed to his head. Bronco said he went for pins, but failing that, he favored the tilt, a move that earns the tilter 3 points. The 108 class’s top seed, he proved the prognosticators right by sailing through four matches at Stony Brook University over the weekend — two following a first-round bye on Saturday, matches that he won by technical falls, and semifinal and final bouts that he won by scores of 7-1 and 6-1 on Sunday. Three of his county opponents had lost to him in earlier-season matches. His opponent in the final was a senior, a returning county champion and state place-winner, Corey Campsey said.
Bronco, whose record stands at 31-2 at the moment, was one of nine competitors East Hampton sent to the counties — the others being Adam Beckwith, the team’s captain, at 190, Aman Chugh at 215, Juan Espinoza at 285, Franco Palombino at 215, Justin Prince at 160, Matias Gonzalez at 152, Josue Elias at 124, and Juan Roque at 116. Beckwith did the best of them, finishing fourth at 190.
It was the most county qualifiers that East Hampton’s program has had in some time.
Bronco trains year round at Barn Brothers Wrestling Club in Manorville, with other top wrestlers as his training partners. In the coming week, he’ll be working out daily with his fellow county champions at Hauppauge High School.
His sister, Sadie, an engineering student at Florida Polytechnic now, after having graduated from high school a year early, used to wrestle too, and was quite impressive, though the Covid pandemic forced her to give it up. “She wants to be an electrical or mechanical engineer,” her mother said.
Asked what in academia interested him, Bronco said, with a smile, “Not much.”
He does well in school, his parents said, though he isn’t giving much thought to academics or college at the moment, wrestling being uppermost in his mind.
There was, Bronco said, a good spirit on this year’s team, which, he added, kept improving. He agreed that in his class all the wrestlers could be described as wiry and quick, but it’s the head, as his father said, that wins.
