Exceptional win for Freeman wrestlers

In the grand and honorable sport of wrestling, team championships tend to get crowned late, so it’s fitting that the Freeman Scotties had the state Class 1A wrestling championship sewed up by the time the first pair of finalists were called to the mat.

The school’s first state title had already been a long time coming.

It was just 11 years ago that the Scotties finished the regular season with eight wrestlers. That means that, some nights, it was 50-50 whether Freeman would forfeit more weight classes than it would wrestle.

And it was 10 years ago that coach Chad Ripke arrived to take over the program. Nothing against the previous coach, he said at the time. He taught at Freeman middle school and for a sport like wrestling, you really need to be at the high school if you’re going to arm-bar kids in the hall and convince them to wrestle.

 It took a while. There was the year he finished the season with six wrestlers. A 50 percent increase the next year still left Freeman with large number of forfeited weights.

Wrestling may be the most difficult high school sport in which to recruit athletes – simply because the introduction is pretty severe.

Here is a brief list of things a first-time wrestler learns in his first day in the practice room:

How do you know you’re halfway through your workout? You throw up for the first time.

When it comes to neck bridges, the toll comes the next morning.

You will never appreciate fresh air more than after having spent two and a half hours with your nose locked in some sweaty guy’s armpit.

And leverage takes on a whole new meaning when it involves turning your body into a pretzel.

But Ripke and the Scotties persevered.

It’s tough to build a wrestling program when the athletes only wrestle during the high school seasons. Larger programs are populated with dedicated, year-round wrestlers who attend camps and wrestle freestyle over the summer. They can easily pick up two high school seasons worth of experience over one summer session.

 Ripke annually takes his wrestlers to the Washington Intensive Camp, which makes every wrestler feel like its their first day in the sport in an effort to encourage the proper work ethic for success.

And that’s made all the difference.

Freeman may not have the deep well of technique to rely on that other programs have, like Northeast A League rival Deer Park, which has a long history in the sport and a roster full of full-time wrestlers.

But what the Scotties have is a bottomless well of desire – the same kind of desire that helped this year’s crop of seniors bring home the school’s first State Class 1A football championship at the start of their junior season.

Couple that with a staggering work ethic, and you have a recipe for a well-earned state wrestling title.

Ripke took 15 wrestlers to the Tacoma Dome for this year’s state Class 1A tournament, and 11 placed.

Senior Markus Goldbach, the school’s lone state champion, explained it best:

 “It’s been a grind for four years. It’s a hard sport,” he told The Spokesman-Review’s Greg Lee. “Technique-wise I’m not the best wrestler, I know that and I accept that. I have to rely a lot on endurance and the conditioning we do in the room, and I have an incredible drill partner, Sebastian Hyta. He inspires me to become better.

“We have to rely on hard wrestling, gritty wrestling. It’s all the back-door points that add up.”

Whichever door the points came from, the accomplishment is easily one of the most exceptional wrestling titles won by an area school in an area filled with exceptional wrestling accomplishments.

And it’s a title with the kind of backstory that will be used to inspire young wrestlers for a long time to come.