After hours of practice in the mat room, the wrestling team is ready for the competitive part of their season against other schools.
Wrestlers use the term “going live” to reference this concept of playing hard in wrestling.
“‘Going live’ is wrestling your hardest, just as hard as you can,” senior captain Pedro Cerda said.
When the team practices in the mat room, they follow a daily routine before they can practice going live.
“We get the mats out—we have to spray them and clean them. Once they’re all sprayed and mopped up, we run a bunch of laps, and we do some warm ups,” Cerda said.
Senior captain Jack Murphy, who has wrestled for the past six years, said the team’s common routine for their practices consists of a variety of exercises.
“We usually do running and do some things to stretch—neck stretches are important because those are getting pulled around a lot,” Murphy said. “Then we start drilling some moves and we were progressively doing some more live wrestling.”
The team said they try to take full advantage of their opportunities when given the chance.
On the day of the game, the team still physically prepares right before the match.
“Before a match, we usually get warm, so we won’t be going out there with stiff joints,” Murphy said.
When it’s time to go live, the team members said they give their teammates their last push of motivation before the game by yelling the nicknames of each of the people going.
“We shout people out at the beginning of each of their matches, so we usually put our hands on their back and scream their nickname on three,” Murphy said. “We all have our own weird nicknames that we scream out at the beginning of each of their matches.”
During a match Jan. 23 at Bothell against Liberty and Issaquah, the team uses their precision gained from months of practice to best their rival athletes. Murphy managed to pin a player from Liberty, winning his match almost immediately.
After two well-played games, Inglemoor ended up losing both matches. In one of the matches, the wrestling team was able to rack up 18 points against Liberty’s 36 points.
But, according to Murphy, losing the match does not invalidate the wrestling team’s potential for future improvement. Murphy said that there is plenty of potential in the team to make Inglemoor a true contender in wrestling.
“There’s a lot of new people and a lot of them are really athletic, so all they got to do to improve is doing a lot of off-season stuff just to really work on their technique and experience,” Murphy said. “A lot of it is because they’re young, they just need to learn how to be more confident in their stuff.”
