Reggie had a full wrestling season as a varsity alternate. He was sitting behind Brad, who ultimately placed 2nd at State and will be wrestling for St. Cloud State next year. He had many shining moments...and a few disappointing ones...both on the JV mat and on the Varsity mat.
Reggie spent the first two months of wrestling season in a cast and then doing physical therapy. From the start, we had January 27th circled on the calendar: 9th grade individual sections. Reggie's goal was to wrestle that day. Reggie did all his PT homework, and I manipulated the schedule to get him into his post-op appointment a week early. He was cleared to wrestle on the 24th!
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| But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. Isaiah 40:31 |
Of course his stamina and strength would be lagging behind a lot of the competition; even being on the mat at all was a win. Reggie went 3-2 and finished 4th. The top two wrestlers move on to 9th grade state. He's got one more year to qualify.
The next opportunity to wrestle was a team quad. Someone didn't make weight, so Reggie unexpectedly got called up to the varsity mat. Reggie got a varsity win only 101 days after his surgery!
The next day, Reggie wrestled in the JV SEC individual tournament. He went 3-1 to finish 2nd. Reggie wrestled a total of 11 matches this season, with a record of 7-4!
As an 8th grader, this was the last year Reggie would be eligible to wrestle in the youth tournaments advancing to NYWA State, which he has competed in every year since 2nd grade (except 2020 and 2021 due to Covid). But by February we had learned Reggie would need a second ankle surgery. In order to have the best outcome and a shot at playing baseball, we decided to schedule the surgery right after the high school wrestling season.
In Minnesota, 7th and 8th graders are allowed to wrestle on the high school team. After a summer and fall of faithful early-morning weightlifting, Reggie was invited to join the high school team. There was one other 7th grader on the team. It is typical for a 106 or 113 pound middle schooler to fill the varsity roster, but a bit more difficult for a 126 pound kid to pull it off. Reggie spent most of the season hanging out in JV, which was fine with Bryan and I but frustrating for Reggie. I kept telling him to work hard and be patient. It took until the last opportunity of the season for him to get his big shot.
Here are the 5 matches I won't forget (click the orange headings to view the full matches on YouTube):
Reggie's first high school match was short and to the point with him pinning his opponent in 36 seconds. It was a home meet and I'm glad I was there to see it!
At the beginning of the season, Reggie was named a "varsity alternate". If a varsity wrestler in his weight was unable to wrestle (ill, injury, academic probation, skin issue, etc) or didn't make weight, he would fill the spot. He got a chance in a dual against Roseville, and I happened to be there! (Because we have other kids, usually only one and sometimes neither parent could be at his meets).
It was an exciting match to the end. His opponent was leading, but not by much. At the end, he was down by 2 and only needed a take-down to tie it. He took his shot, and it looked promising (watch his teammates cheering with their 2 fingers up), but his opponent hooked his arm around and that was all that was needed to secure the win. (Loss for Reggie.)
My uneditted footage is not great. When I get excited, I'm not looking at my camera!
3. The Thousand Dollar Match
I would like to forget the thousand dollar match, but I never will. It was the match Reggie was put in an illegal choke hold (wrestlers must have an arm along with the head in a headlock). The ref was looking for the pin and didn't notice Reggie had lost consciousness. The ref called the pin, Reggie regained awareness, got up, and then staggered back, losing consciousness again. It seemed like minutes but was probably only seconds. The trainer expressed a lot of concern, so we ended up taking him to the ER for an EKG. That's how it became the thousand dollar match.
Reggie was back on the mat by Monday.
After that, Reggie kept doing his thing on JV, hoping for his big shot. They have a system. Coaches determine the lineup for duals (team competion) but wrestlers can challenge for a spot in varsity individual tournaments. Reggie didn't think he could beat the 126 varsity wrestler (Caleb), but Caleb decided to cut weight and go to 120 at the end of the season. The 120 (Moises) had been struggling to make weight all season, so he went up to 126, and Reggie thought he had a chance.
The high school season ends with sections, and then, if you qualify, state. Reggie decided to do a wrestle off for the 126 spot and won!
To advance to state, you must finish 1st or 2nd at sections. We were so sure Reggie would not make a run for state this year that we booked a flight for spring break that same weekend.
At sections, Reggie was trailing in his first match, but that never seems to phase him. He went on the attack and pinned his opponent, to get his first varsity win and pin!
After that, he wrestled the guy who ended up getting 1st and lost. He won his 3rd match, putting him in the match for 3rd place. Third place doesn't get you to state, but if you didn't lose to the guy who loses to the guy who gets first, they have what is called "wrestling for true second". So basically the two wrestlers who lost to the champion (but noone else) wrestle each other for 2nd place. If Reggie won the match for 3rd, he would "wrestle for true second".
Again, Reggie found himself points behind in the match, but hanging on. He got a bloody nose, and that's when the ref noticed his mouth was also bleeding. The ref was mad. Because Reggie has braces, he is required to wear a mouthgaurd. He had forgotten to put it in before the match, so the ref gave his opponent an extra point.
Now behind 7-1, he was mad at the refs but he took it out on his opponent, and pinned him. (My video is really bad. I wasn't at a good angle for the mat he was wrestling on and people kept walking in front of me.)
Reggie went on to "wrestle for true second" and lost. If he had won, he would have been a state entrant at 126lbs as a 7th grader! There were only two 7th graders who made it to the state tournament at or above 120lbs this year. Reggie knows both of them!
Needless to say, Bryan won't be booking any more flights during the High School State Wrestling Tournament for many years. Two Woodbury wrestlers qualified for State. Sophomore Brad finished 5th, and junior Alex won! He was the Royal's first state champ since 1979.
When the high school season was over, Reggie was allowed to compete in the youth circuits. He went on to finish 6th at MN/USA State.
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!
I can appreciate Dr. Osterholm and his depiction of Omicron's "blizzard" effects. Being from the north, we know when a blizzard blows through everything comes to a screeching halt. 'Twas the case with Omicron in January. Post winter break, so many people had covid that it was hard to do any business as usual.
Being the directors of our youth wrestling club gave us a glimpse of the challenges business owners are facing. Half of our coaches had covid and one couldn't get off work due to short staffing there. Many kids were out, too. We managed to keep practices going, though one week we had to divide the group in half and have each half come on separate nights. That week, we had one legitimate coach, Bryan, Reggie, and myself holding the practices!
Our church moved it's youth services online. The Sunday services continued to be offered in-person and online, so we elected to do online during the highest peak of this wave.
For the last year, testing has been very accessible for us, and that became extremely difficult. We couldn't walk-in, we had to have appointments, and the community testing sites were booked out for days. Therefore, Brett went to doing virtual speech therapy because their protocols require a negative test if there are any exposures within the household. Later in the surge, we were able to get rapid tests from Amazon and now we have a good supply in our medicine cabinet.
The hardest part was having Reggie and Lydia go back to distance learning. This makes three years in a row that their schooling has been directly disrupted by covid. Our district keep most of the primary schools going, but all secondary schools went online. Fortunately, it was temporary, and they have been back in-person for a couple of weeks now.
And yet we have managed to stay healthy. I'm really quite surprised by this since all through this surge in cases, Reggie continued to wrestle four practices and at least one tournament a week.
Bryan had post-season tickets to the Packers game, and I needed a break from wrestling and feeling closed in from covid-related shut-downs. So the kids and I did some "glamping" at a winter resort up north.
We stayed in an RV camper cabin. Which is just like what it sounds. It was basically a camper cabin but had a bathroom with shower and kitchenette.
The resort had a small ski hill and a tubing hill. We stuck to the tubing hill. It was also very close to one of our favorite state parks.
I had to drive through snow on the way up, and it was very cold. We had to keep space heaters running so the pipes wouldn't freeze, and the shower never did warm up. We were able to watch the disappointing Packer game in our camper cabin. It was well below zero on the last day, so I was relieved to get the car running after sitting out in subzero temps overnight. Sounds like fun, huh?
It was.
