Wrestling Team ‘Tapping’ Their Way into Season
The AHS wrestling team trains tediously for their remaining league matches.
MOOR Photo by YIBEI LIU KAYIU WONG
Staff Writer
With this year’s season starting in November for the wrestling team, these past two months have comprised of daily practice and rigorous training for the Moors. According to Head Coach Michael Williams, there are 36 members on this year’s team: six returning members from last year and 30 who are new.
“With so many newcomers, we have to focus a lot on rebuilding the fundamentals. Wrestling is a sport that takes time to develop the good technique to win,” Williams said.
Because of the large amount of first-year wrestlers on the team, practices revolve around teaching and developing basic wrestling styles, reflexes and responses. For the team’s experienced members, conditioning and keeping fit are their two main goals. Additionally, the team had lost three experienced wrestlers due to academic ineligibility at the beginning of the season, and as a result, many underclassmen this year are being put in the varsity lineup.
Losing these key wrestlers from last season and having such a new lineup proved to be major contributing factors in the losses of the team’s first two Almont League matches. On Dec. 18, the team went up against Montebello and on Jan. 8 they went against Schurr. According to Williams, Montebello and Schurr are the team’s toughest and most experienced opponents in the league.
“[Our match] against Schurr went better than we expected and Montebello proved to be a learning experience for us in building up from our [loss] and moving forward,” junior Ethan Tavares said.
As the team moves on to their remaining league matches, they are hopeful in defeating their future opponents and qualifying as one of Almont League’s top three teams for the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF). The team had seven wrestlers advance to CIF preliminaries last year and Williams believes his returners this year will qualify. Currently halfway into the season, the team continues to maintain a positive mentality.
“For now we are going to just keep working to match skills to the different body types we have. I see great promise in them. Even though wrestling is an individual sport, we always wrestle for each other like a family,” Williams said.