Reggie's wrestling highlights

Moving knocked us off our feet for a few months, but we are finding our way into our new normal now.  I will share more about our move in the next post.

After his 2020 season being cut short and 2021 being very limited and disrupted, 2022 was almost back to the full schedule.  Bryan and I served as the directors of our club again.  For a few weeks in January, we only had one coach due to covid and complications of covid. It was all hands on deck, but we pushed through and ran a complete season.  We had more state qualifiers than any other season since the beginning of our involvement in 2016!

Our club is geared toward beginners. We stayed involved because wrestling is a struggling sport in urban areas, but Reggie got his start there and he has gained a lot from it.  Reggie didn't have a good wrestling partner (his skill and weight) in the program so he was more like a mentor.  So we enrolled him in another club (St. Paul Academy) for his own development.  

That meant that when he was also doing middle school wrestling, he had eight practices a week!  The middle school season was only seven weeks long.  His school had 3 kids sign up, so they combined programs with another school in the district.  That school had a covid outbreak and everything got cancelled for two weeks, so he only had three meets and went 6 and 0.

Reggie did four big individual tournaments.  Yellowjacket and Gopher State are open tournaments but they attract some of the toughest wrestlers in the midwest.  Because there is no qualifying process, seeding in the brackets is a lot of guesswork. In the Yellowjacket tournament, the seeding did not work to his advantage and he didn't make the podium.  

Gopher State was a little further into the season when he had found his groove, and the seeding was more accurate.  He won his first match against Caleb, sending Caleb to the consolation bracket.  He lost his second match to Tyce and went to the consolation bracket.  He won his way through the consolation bracket only to face Caleb again for 3rd place.  This time, he lost, and got 4th place. Tyce worked his way through the consolation bracket and landed in 5th. So over the course of the day, he won against the kid who got 3rd and lost against the kid who got 5th!  I would say they were pretty evenly matched! 

MNUSA State was the big surprise.  Within the MNUSA system, Reggie was grouped with kids who were older than him this year, and he struggled in the tournaments at the local level.  We almost didn't even take him to a regional qualifier tournament because we didn't expect him to qualify.  Our calendar made us decide to take him to one "for the experience".  Turned out, he won!  1st, 2nd, and 3rd qualified for state, but placing 1st gave him a better spot in seeding.

At MNUSA State, Reggie easily won his first match.  He lost his second match to the kid who ended up taking second.  His third match was against a kid (Parker) who lives in the metro and they had wrestled before.  Reggie won, which put him in the match for 3rd place.  His 3rd place match was painful to watch as he fell behind, nearly getting pinned in the first period.  He started the second period trailing 11-2, but made up some ground and went into the third period 11-12 (Reggie).  Reggie pinned his opponent in the third period, taking 3rd in the state!  The come-from-behind matches are the worst to watch at the time, but best to remember.  

The final progression of tournaments were the NYWA tournaments.  He started out qualifying for regions at the district tournament at Tartan.  At regions, similar to MNUSA, he had to place 1st, 2nd, or 3rd to advance to NYWA State.  He faced Parker again and this time Parker took advantage of a mistake and won.  Reggie placed 2nd, so he advanced to State but had a tougher position in the bracket as a result.

Reggie won his first match and lost his second match against William.  He won his next two matches.  Guess who he wrestled next?  Parker!  Unfortunately during their match, Parker came down hard and had to forfeit the match due to a suspected concussion. Reggie faced William again in the match for 3rd place and lost.  He placed 4th at NYWA State! (Caleb was also in his bracket and he took 2nd.  We would have liked to see Reggie wrestle him again!)

Normally this would be the end of his season, but he was invited to represent Minnesota as a member of Team Minnesota Thunder at the Heartland Duals in Omaha.  This was an excellent opportunity to network with other wrestlers around the state and get some good coaching.  Reggie was the 130lb. wrestler; Parker was the 120lb wrestler!