Rebuilding the team
As Sam Petersen enters his eighth season as the head coach of the Medical Lake High School wrestling team, he finds himself in a rare situation. In past years, his Cardinals were perennial favorites to win the Great Northern League, but this season Medical Lake finds itself in a rebuilding year.
“We’re starting all over from scratch,” said Petersen. “We’ve got a lot of kids who are decent athletes and work hard, but they just don’t have that varsity level wrestling experience. It’s going to take us a while to get that. We might start four or five freshmen on varsity, which is going to be tough in this league.”
While going from favorite to underdog is a new role for the Cardinals, not having the bulls-eye on his young team may be a blessing.
“Last year we had a good team coming back, and that kind of puts a lot of pressure on you,” Petersen said. “We had some injuries, but we had some kids step up and did a great job, so in the end it was pretty satisfying last year. This year it’s a little more relaxing for us. We just have our focus on getting better.”
One veteran Petersen and his staff will be counting on is junior Ty Souders. Souders will begin the season wrestling at 140 pounds before eventually settling in at 135 pounds. Souders just missed out on a berth for state last year, going as an alternate after coming up short in the regional tournament.
“At regionals last year, the first match I wrestled a kid from Quincy and pinned him in the first round in like a minute,” said Souders. “I lost my second match, and then won my third. After that, I hurt my knee. Going into that last match, I met that kid in a qualifier for state; he beat me by one point. I was very disappointed.”
“He needs to finish out matches,” said Petersen. “He had a tendency last year, when he could shut the door on somebody, he would let them back in the match. He needs to finish the match out aggressively and basically shut the door on the kid when he gets him down, and finish the match strong.”
To get himself ready to finish strong this season, Souders put in extra time in the weight room in the off-season and worked on his take-downs. One area of concern for Petersen, though, is the amount of quality work Souders will face in the wrestling room during practice.
“The hardest thing is right now we have to keep rotating kids in on him because we really don’t have anyone that can really push him,” said Petersen. “The hardest part with us is to get a kid that can make him scramble in the drills and keep that high intensity up because he can just pretty much handle most of the kids in the room.”
Despite the number of inexperienced wrestlers around him, the Cardinal junior is hoping to lead himself and his team back to the top of the GNL standings.
“I want to place top four at state this year and help get at least four or five other guys to go to state with me,” said Souders. “We only have two or three seniors who have wrestled varsity. We just work out with them to get them to key in on everything. A lot of them are freshmen and sophomores, so we get them used to the new moves and get them ready for all the tournaments and meets.”