The wrestling team looks better than ever and now they’ve set their sights on the traditional state championship on February 12 after earning an overall record of 18-14 and region record of 7-2. However, their success hasn’t come easily, from a stringent mentality to physical endurance the team trains adamantly to achieve the goals they’ve long been awaiting.
“Their goal is obviously to win a state title. I want to win a state title. All that’s predicated on a little bit of luck, and how much they’ve worked,” said head wrestling coach, Mike Lancaster, adding “They’ve worked. I mean, they’re going to reap the benefits of whatever they put into it. And we have a pretty darn good group of seniors.”
Everybody knows the strenuous practices wrestling endures, grappling with each other in a 90-degree shed for two hours, on a floor covered in their sweat; it can’t get much worse.
“Yeah, the worst days are the workout days, because you’re really, really sore and you have no energy left in your body,” said senior Owen Kler.
“The room is like a hundred degrees. It’s like a sauna; the mat gets sweaty and slippery and it sucks.” said junior Blake Barry.
So what keeps these athletes so invested in the team?
Barry said “I was at first blindly following the coaches’ advice to continue with the team and honestly did not like it, but I trusted the coaches and lasted long enough to realize that I really enjoy the sport. A lot of people don’t do that. When I was a freshman, a lot of freshmen joined and now we only have four juniors. A lot of people don’t get to that point where they stick with it.”
Moreover, fighting through these practices creates something unique, a mentality, culture, and community not found in any other sport.
Senior Meca said, “I think the guys that we have in the room are a special group of guys, because we all come into the wrestling room and we came here today to put in work and wrestle and not a lot of people want to do that. So I think it’s just a specific group of people that we have in the room that go in there and push each other and make each other better every single day. It really helps all of us and I think that makes us as good as a team that we are right now.”
Kler expanded on that idea, saying the wrestling team is very dedicated because, “you can’t just kind of like show up and expect to be good. You have to continually work and you have to sleep right and do everything right. In order to be successful, you can’t just kind of show up and be really good.”
As the team nears the end of the season, the bond grows even stronger and they are determined to achieve their goals of placing in state because no other team has the conviction found in St. Pius X wrestling.
