Good year for Fish
Cory Fish always sets high standards for himself. Accepting anything less than meeting those standards is difficult for the University High School graduate.
Fish won 125 of his 145 career matches as a U-Hi wrestler, winning a pair of individual state championships and leading the Titans to their first State 4A team title his senior season.
In his first season at Boise State, Fish moved directly into the Broncos starting lineup at 125 pounds, posting a 17-11 season record – and was disappointed.
“I didn’t quite do what I wanted,” he said. “I didn’t make nationals. But I had a pretty good year, I guess. For a freshman.”
Fully recovered from surgery on an injured knee, Fish looks forward to getting back on the wrestling mat.
“We’ve been working out three times a week, lifting weights and trying to get stronger,” he said. “We start team workouts in August. I’m hoping to help out with some wrestling camps this summer, too.”
When Fish started wrestling at U-Hi, he was almost too small to wrestle at the sport’s lightest weight, 101 pounds.
“As a freshman I was, like, 83 pounds,” he said. “They had to petition me into meets, showing that it was my choice if I got hurt in matches – but I never got hurt the whole year. My sophomore year I was up to 95 pounds.”
As a junior, Fish finally had to start cutting weight to wrestle at 103 pounds and won the first of his two state tournament titles. As a senior he jumped up to wrestle at 119, capturing a second-straight state title.
“I got a lot bigger and I put on some muscle,” Fish said of his collegiate frame. “I’m cutting from 135 down to 125 pounds.”
Fish prepared himself for Division I collegiate wrestling at a Pac-10 school (Boise State competes in the Pac-10 in wrestling).
“I knew it was going to be a lot harder,” he said. “In college you wrestle a seven-minute match instead of six minutes. That extra minute is really tough. That was hard to get used to. You have to train a lot harder and a lot longer to prepare for it. And the competition is a lot better. Every match was a close match – there are no blow-outs like there were in high school.”
Fish wrestled in some exciting locales, including a dual meet at Nebraska and the regular-season finale at Iowa.
“Our coach, Greg Randall, wrestled at Iowa on four national championship teams,” Fish explained. “When we went back there he got a standing ovation from the fans. Iowa isn’t the powerhouse it was back then, but it was still fun to go back there and wrestle. We gave them a close match. We lost, 24-13, but the matches were really close.”
And there were several interesting tournaments, as well.
“I think the most interesting place I wrestled was the Kaufman-Brand Open in Omaha, Neb.,” he said. “That was a huge tournament. There were 64 wrestlers in my division and it was a one-day tournament. They were wrestling until about 3 o’clock in the morning at that one.
“By comparison, the Pac-10 tournament was not that big of a deal. There were only 10 guys there.”
Fish entered the Pac-10 tournament as the No. 6 seed. He lost his first match to Eric Stevenson of Oregon State, 6-3, rallied to blank Zach Bigboy of Cal State-Bakersfield, 5-0, but was stopped short of the medal round.
Close matches were the rule for Fish last season. Of his 17 victories, only three came by pin and only one was a major decision.
The Broncos started three freshmen, including Fish. Kennewick’s Tyler Sherfey started at 149 and Boise’s Andy Patrick started at heavyweight.
This year, Boise State should return a healthy Tommy Owen, a three-time state champion at University.
“Tommy was undefeated this year for us,” Fish laughed. “He was 1-0 before he got hurt. He should be back and wrestling at 141 for us this year and give us another tough senior.
“It was good to have a familiar face around this year. I live with my grandparents in Meridian, but during the season I lived with Tommy and a couple other senior wrestlers because it was closer to campus.”