The wrestling season is upon us! Because the first match isn’t until December 9, the team hasn’t done much practicing so far, but players are preparing by visiting the weight room, and attending meetings regarding how the season is expected to go.    

This year, the team is losing quite a few seniors who assisted us to become champions in the Kenton Trail division. It will be interesting to see how the teams this year fill that spot.

This year there are nine girls on the team, while there are about 30 boys on the team. This is a significant difference, but compared to recent years, there seems to be an increase in the number of girls involved in the sport. 

Senior Ava Ater has been involved in wrestling since her freshman year. According to Ater, “The girls’ coaching staff and just the environment of not the whole team but the girls side of it” is her favorite part. Ater is ready to win a state title, and be a state champion for the girls this year, which would make her the first in school history. 

This is the first year that the girls and the boys will practice separately. According to Ater, mostly the practices will most likely look to be “a lot of teaching the girls how to wrestle because other than me the other girls are first years. It’ll be a lot of teaching and then we’ll turn it into harder work.” 

Freshman Ernesto Perez has been wrestling for four years now and joined the high school wrestling team because “the high school team is really good, they’re 11th in the state, they had a really good team last year.” Perez also said that being able to wrestle in high school is something that he had hoped to do. 

Experienced wrestlers need to have a favorite move, or at least a go to move. Ater explained her favorite move to me, as did Perez.

Ater told me that her favorite wrestling move was called a “CP; a crowd pleaser, it’s basically like a standing headlock, and you kinda do a backwards dive and end up on top of them. It’s something I’m practicing and hopefully something I can use in a real match sooner rather than later.” 

Perez’s favorite move is called the “cradle.” It is described as holding an infant in your arms, but you are holding your opponent by the neck with one arm and the other arm is held behind the knee.

Perez seems excited to join the high school wrestling team, and he could grow and improve over the next few years working with the 30 other boys that are currently on the team. As with the increased number of girls joining the wrestling team, Jonathan Alder finally has an adequate number of girls to wrestle by themselves, and hold their own practices. 

While Perez is expecting injuries, which are inevitable in just about every sport, he is looking forward to “Going to a lot of tournaments, winning a lot of matches, and taking losses.”