A year ago, the wrestling team had 12 members. This year, they have more than doubled in size. Under coach David Muszynski, who also coaches at Northshore Middle School, the team has shot up in size.

“I brought up a lot of freshmen from the middle school. It’s going to be a struggle for the first year here, but the way they’re going in progress, we’re gonna have a solid team in the next few years,” Muszynski said. “We’re building up a program here.”

With rapid growth come new challenges, however. This year, the team has only four returning seniors, and over half is composed of new freshmen.

“We are a really young team. Really young. We have a couple seniors that are veterans, but everybody else is young,” Muszynski said. “My goal for the team is try to build up their confidence, try to build up their strength and conditioning.”

Senior Anthony Bautista is one of the team veterans. He said that this year, conditioning and workouts at practice have become more focused and intense.

“Our new assistant coach — he works us out really hard,” Bautista said. “[For] conditioning, we do sprints, 20 minutes of live wrestling, then 10 minutes of hard flow drilling, a lot of pushups and core strength, then partner strength.”

After a strong season last year, Bautista said he hopes to place in regionals and make it to the state competition this year. But the team’s first challenge came sooner: they lost meets to Eastlake on Dec. 4 and Issaquah on Dec. 6. However, they have a new weapon on their side: senior Braden Dick, who has just decided to return to the team after watching a meet. 

“I saw a lot of potential to help out the team — I don’t care about going to state this year,” Dick said. “I care about the program and the culture and want to see it continued.”