It’s never too early to start preparing for your next season.
Just ask the members of the Commerce Tigers wrestling team, who have been working throughout the month to prepare for their upcoming winter season.
Coach Kendall Love said upwards of 20 wrestlers have been attending, and working to keep themselves in shape for the 2008-2009 wrestling season.
“Basically, we have a few practices, then we go to other places and match up with other teams to get some live wrestling in,” Love said. “We’ve probably seen between 25 to 30 teams throughout the month. We’ve seen several really good schools. We wrestled Gilmer County, the AAA state champs. We’ve faced several AAAAA schools, Brookwood, all the Forsyth County schools, and we’ve had a good summer.”
Love said his wrestlers have competed well over the summer. They took part in a league last week at South Forsyth High School. Love said out of the 12 to 15 schools that took part in the league tournament last Friday, Commerce had the largest number of wrestlers to place.
“If they had scored the tournament, we would have won it,” he said.
The tournament was broken into a varsity bracket, and a J.V. bracket.
On the varsity side, in their weight classes, Doug Maloch and Nick Arostegui placed first, Jon Cash took second, Casey Drinkard and Thomas Sears finished third, and Dillon Desean and Tyler Austin placed fourth.
“We had a couple of varsity starters out,” Love said. “Phillip Edwards probably would have placed real high, as well as Terrance Martin. Both of them were out of town for the week.”
In the J.V. bracket, in their weight classes, Chance McClure, Zach Harmon and Bo Aaron won first, Chase Barnett, Austin Patterson and Josh Swistack placed second, and Jessie Savage finished fourth.
Love said the summer workouts go a long way toward preparing for the winter season.
“We don’t really concentrate on conditioning, because the season doesn’t start until winter,” he said. “We basically work on areas that need improvement. I try to focus in on one or two areas, and really hit them hard, and really work on more technique than anything during the summer. That way, when the season starts, we can re-hit the technique, but we don’t have to spend nearly as much time on it, and can go straight to conditioning.”
Love said he tries to get the equivalent of 30 matches in during the summer schedule.
“That’s a season for some folks, you know,” he said. “So, it’s kind of a season in the off season. It’s really important.”
Love said that most of his wrestlers showed up to the summer practice this month.
“We’ve had about 23 guys on average,” he said. “Of course, there were different guys depending on the week. Some were on vacation, or whatever. We should have around 30 kids when the season kicks off in October, and about 23 of them showed up all summer, so that’s good. We’ve made some strides.”
This week marks the last for practice for the Tigers. The team was scheduled to travel to North Oconee to wrestle several teams on Tuesday. They’ll travel to Clarke Central on Thursday for a multi-squad meet starting at 5:30 p.m.
