May 6—After one of the most memorable seasons in recent Haywood County high school sports history, Pisgah wrestling earned another honor on Sunday night.

The team was recognized as the region's top male Olympic sport team in Division I during the 64th Annual Western North Carolina Sports Awards Banquet at the Omni Grove Park Inn.

"It was really just kind of an awesome moment," Pisgah Coach Ryan Gibson said. "It was one of those ones where you just kind of sit back, and you go, 'Man, what a group of kids.'"

The team was up against Enka wrestling and A.C. Reynolds cross country for the award.

"What that group's done is very satisfying, because they deserve it. It's not about the coaches. It's all about the kids and what they do and what they accomplish. It was awesome just to see other people recognize that," Gibson said.

This season was the second straight year that the Bears wrestling team won the Western Region in the dual team wrestling tournament and finished as runners-up in that state tournament. The Bears went 27-2 as a dual team this season.

On top of that, Pisgah went to the individual state tournament and came home with a team title after six of its wrestlers qualified for state championship final matches, with seniors Landon Pope and Kail Burnette bringing home titles individually.

"That's a group of winners, and they wanted to win. That's what drove them — they wanted to be successful," Gibson said.

The coach gave a lot of credit to a great group of seniors, who put in the work over four years.

"We always stressed that the toughest battles were in that room. Nobody knows what those kids put in that room," Gibson said.

In fact, he said this group was one of the most special ones he's been a part of in his 19 years coaching Pisgah wrestling.

"You dream of a group of kids, or groups of kids, like we've had in the last couple years, to just totally change the face of your program right, to flip you in the direction where you want to be. That's this group," Gibson said.

That group of seniors has been extremely successful. Over the four-year span, the team held a 120-8 record in dual team matches. Gibson had a whole list of accomplishments that the team has racked up, including four-time conference dual team and individual tournament team champions, two-time west region individual tournament champs and two-time runner-up and two-time dual-team west region champions.

"The group before them set the stage, and these guys were able to do it," Gibson said.

A world-champion Cuban wrestler has dismissed his lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletic Association over rules that he said unfairly barred him from wrestling for Iowa State University.

The lawsuit, filed in December 2025, was voluntarily dismissed late last week by lawyers for Reineri Andreu Ortega, a student and prospective college wrestler at ISU, with no public disclosure as to whether a settlement had been reached.

The lawsuit challenged the NCAA’s so-called “Five-Year Eligibility Clock” and the manner in which the NCAA decides when that clock begins running and thus when a student’s eligibility to compete expires.

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Attorneys for Ortega argued the NCAA’s application of the rule violates antitrust laws and unjustifiably restrained the ability of Ortega and other college athletes to “earn meaningful compensation that is now available to (other) NCAA Division I athletes.”

The lawsuit had its origins in a 2021 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that paved the way for college athletes to receive compensation for use of their names, images, and likenesses. Since then, the market for name, image and likeness compensation opportunities available to NCAA Division I athletes has “exploded into a multi-million dollar industry,” the lawsuit claimed.

However, the lawsuit added, that form of compensation is largely available only to NCAA Division I athletes. Athletes who compete outside of what the lawsuit calls “the NCAA monopoly” have no meaningful opportunity to collect revenue-sharing income or profit from their name, image or likeness, the lawsuit argues.

Under NCAA bylaws, an athlete has five years of eligibility to play four seasons of “intercollegiate competition” in his or her chosen sport. This five-year window is known as the “eligibility clock” and begins to run from the date on which an athlete registers as a full-time student at any “collegiate institution,” regardless of whether the institution is a member of the NCAA and regardless of their participation in sports.

Lawyers for Ortega said the rule has had the effect of barring students from competing in NCAA sports. They say students such as Ortega “can attend a non-NCAA college for three years without playing any sports, take two years off from school for personal reasons, transfer to a four-year NCAA school, and the student will have used all of their eligibility without ever having competed in a college sport for a non-NCAA or NCAA college.”

Ortega completed high school in Cuba in the spring of 2016, and then, beginning in the fall of 2016, he began taking courses at Manuel Fajardo University in Cuba. In 2017, Ortega began training and wrestling for the Cuban National Team, which has no affiliation to a college or university, while continuing to study at Manuel Fajardo University until the spring of 2019.

Ortega is a two-time U23 world champion and two-time Pan American gold medalist, according to USA Wrestling.

In December 2022, Ortega left the Cuban National Team and came to America as a refugee. In the spring of 2023, Ortega enrolled at ISU, where he earned a spot on the wrestling team but without competing during the 2022-23 season.

According to the lawsuit, the NCAA denied Ortega’s request for eligibility beyond the 2022-23 season due to the five-year rule, indicating Ortega’s eligibility clock started while he was attending Manuel Fajardo University, not when he enrolled at ISU.

The lawsuit claimed the NCAA’s application of the five-year rule violates the Sherman Act by restraining the market for NCAA Division I college athletes by barring Ortega and similarly situated athletes from having an opportunity to earn money through revenue sharing and the use of their name, image and likeness.

Ortega claimed the NCAA had effectively excluded him from an NCAA Division I college career, and because, as a 130-pound athlete, he has very limited pro-wresting opportunities open to him after college, a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction barring the continued application of the eligibility rule was necessary.

The lawsuit also sought a permanent injunction that would block the NCAA from applying the five-year rule to students such as Ortega.

The NCAA, which is an association of post-secondary institutions that functions as the governing body of college sports, had sought to dismiss the case, arguing that enjoining the application of the five-year rule would not render Ortega eligible to compete on Iowa State’s wrestling team because there are other factors that bar his competition that were unchallenged in the lawsuit.

The NCAA also argued that only restraints that are “commercial in nature” are subject to provisions of the Sherman Act, and the five-year rule is not commercial.

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