On Dec. 6, the wrestling season began. Junior Ian Lewis says that they are looking forward to UCBAC. Senior Mason Raab goes into explaining what UCBAC is by saying, “it is where all the schools in the county come to one place and wrestle.” Senior Clay Lawrence adds, “it is a conference, too. The conference itself is called UCBAC, and then it’s a tournament where all the schools go to Edgewood. It lasts two days, and the best wrestler in the conference wins.”
Other tournaments the boys are looking forward to are Kent County and Tomahawk Duels. Kent County is a “holiday tournament right before Christmas and a bunch of schools from all over Maryland go to Kent County High School,” says Lawrence.
Tomahawk Duels is a Havre De Grace tournament, and it is “just like a normal bracket,” says Raab. But, Lawrence says he is looking most forward to Tomahawk Duels to “see as a team how [they] do against high caliber competition.”
Raab continues to say that the hardest part about their season would be “the mental training that you have to go through to be ready for practice everyday and matches to win for your team.” Lawrence says, “the hardest part of our sport is being mentally bulletproof and having a mindset where you can’t fail or lose, you have to give champion effort.”
Meanwhile, juniors Mykah Walker and Lewis say that the hardest part is the stress and conditioning. Lewis says for conditioning they are, “running and moving throughout the entire practice.”
Both Walker and Lewis agreed that their biggest competition is going to be C. Milton Wright, because “they always have big wrestlers,” says Walker.
Raab says “everyone is our competition.” Lawrence chimes in to say, “every opponent is our biggest competition; no one is taken lightly, [and] we have a winning standard.”
Senior Isaac Brown says, “the most important thing in wrestling is not to win or lose, but to have fun and have great sportsmanship towards your teammates and the opponent.”
For what the team holds this year, Lawrence says “our team holds accountability to each other to be working hard in the wrestling room, in class and working out.”
He continues, “we have high intensity practice with hard drilling then an instructive period; then, the last hour [goes] fully live at 100% and push ups.”
