With a fourth place team finish at states, a state champion, and three wrestlers celebrating their 100th wins, the wrestling team has a lot to celebrate this season.

Seniors Gabe Chumley and Zane O’Connor were first to hit 100 wins followed by junior Alex Smith.

“When Alex got his 100th win everyone went crazy,” trainer Anna Georgi said. “The support is so welcoming and it’s so great to see a team that’s so close.”

In addition to Smith’s 100th win, he also won states in the 138 pound class, making him the first state champion in the school’s history.

In addition to Smith’s first place finish, Chumley placed second in his weight class, and O’Connor and sophomore Matt Mclaughlin placed third in their weight classes.

Georgi was glad she was at the state meet to see history in the making.

“This is the third year I’ve been with these guys and I’ve never been so proud as I was on Saturday,” Georgi said.

Wrestlers credit their coach for a lot of their success. “The coaching has had a massive effect on me,” Chumley said. “Coach Foy is the greatest coach I could’ve asked for.”

Coach Foy’s job is much more than just getting the boys physically ready for meets. He also must prepare them mentally. The lessons he teaches them are lessons that can be carried out through the rest of their lives.

“That’s Coach Foy’s ultimate goal: to make respectable men out of us, and he’s doing just that,” Smith said. The team ended its season with more than individual achievements. Wrestler came together to develop themselves and the people around them.

“We improved more and more each week and it showed,” O’Conner said. “We beat a good team at Liberty that beat us at the beginning of the season even though we were missing a starter this time.” The team has gone through many changes since not only the start of the program, but the start of this season. The team lost wrestlers to injury, but they were still stronger than they could’ve possibly imagined.

“As a trainer, I’ve seen so many players struggle with the mental and physical parts of wrestling, but in the end, they’ve come out so strong,” Georgi said. “I think the team is really a family, and that’s why they never give up.”

Georgi is not the only one who has noticed the change in the team. The togetherness of the team was very evident in practice and at meets. The team supported each other well, and the welcoming environment is one of the reasons the team was so successful.

“The biggest change I’ve seen is the sense of family with the team,” Chumley said. The sense of family that the wrestling team felt was one of the most important traits for any team to have. The family aspect of the team allowed them to be comfortable with each other and able to talk about more than just sports. This clearly carried over into the support they showed each other on a daily basis.