BY OLIVER CORPUS
Staff Writer
Boys Wrestling was knocked out of CIF with none of the three wrestlers who participated making it to masters. The boys needed to at least place in fifth place to qualify for Southern Section Masters and from there place at least ninth to quality for states.
Five wrestlers were selected for CIF, senior Sebastian Corona, juniors Xander Burright and Kea Sadri, sophomore Samuel Xie, and freshman Dylan Ohashi, however both Xie and Corona were both unable to attend the matches. Unfortunately, both Ohashi and Xie ended up 0-2 in very close matches, and Sadri concluded his match with a score of 2-2, almost making it to day 2.
The team faced extremely tough competition against some of the best wrestlers in California. “My matches didn’t go so well, there were some that I could have won. Experiences definitely play a role in this tournament, but it’s mostly getting over the mental barriers that you face the second you step on the mat,” Ohashi said when summing up his experience in CIF. The highest scoring team of the day ended up being Temecula Valley high school, and due to University’s low player count, they cumulative score for them ended up being quite low.
Although the team did not move on, Coach Takemura was still proud of their accomplishments. “I think the team this year did good considering that there were no team or practice until one week before the season started. Having started late, all of our wrestlers were at a disadvantage from not getting conditioning in the fall. This especially impacted the first year wrestlers that had no experience at all.”
“I think it showed in the beginning of the season we were behind other schools, but as the season progressed we started to catch up,” said Takemura when reminiscing on the team’s overall season that for the most part was plagued with a lack of wrestlers and absences which in some cases stunted Uni’s overall scores.
Despite these challenges, there were still many positive moments in the past season. For example in the lower levels at league finals, many of the wrestlers managed to place top three in their respective weight classes.