The girls wrestling team attended the 2024 Joe Schneider Memorial tournament at Washington High school on Jan. 19. The Falcons had four girls medal including senior Chaire Perks placing third, sophomore Shandler Marshall placing third, sophomore Jacida Kirk placing second, and junior Madeline Haynes placing first.
Haynes said it wasn’t a particularly big or competitive meet but she did well considering her opponents.
“This wasn’t necessarily a big tournament. I’d say it was a pretty average size. I think a couple schools dropped out of it for some reason. All my matches were pretty fast. I won all of them by pins in the first period so they were all less than two minutes. I am happy with how I wrestled but it’s hard to tell when the competition isn’t especially strong,” Haynes said.
Kirk said she prepares for her matches by listening to music that boosts her energy to allow her to focus.
“So [before my matches] I was just trying to lock in because I was very scared and nervous so what I would do to lock in is just sit there and listen to music and just think about what I’m going to do before I get in the match. I would probably listen to any song by Rod Wave even though it’s like a sad artist he just gets me pumped and gets me hyped,” Kirk said.
Girls wrestling coach Jonathan Bunyard said that the team’s goal for this point in the season is to hit their peak which is difficult this year considering practice time off due to break and weather.
“This is the part of the season where we try to hit our peak. We have some girls who aren’t quite there yet which is what we want, we don’t want them to peak too early. We had christmas break where we took a lot of time off this year instead of having a tournament over christmas break and we had a bunch of snow days and those factored in so we saw some of the newer girls and less experienced girls have a little bit of regression because we had less practices but now I think that we’ve kind of started to get back into it,” Bunyard said.
Marshall said wrestling her teammate in the semi finals was rewarding however she knew it would mean a tough loss for her friend.
“Honestly before wrestling my teammate [Kamauri Fowler] I thought about it as just a practice and to have fun. I just treated the match like I was at school practicing. After the match it was kind of bittersweet. I was excited but at the same time I had to wrestle her and she wasn’t very happy,” Marshall said.
Bunyard said when summit girls wrestle each other the coaches watch and allow the girls to wrestle on their own without input from their coaches on the sidelines to ensure a fair match.
“So we don’t want to show favoritism to either of our wrestlers over another one where two girls match up against each other. We just kind of let them go and kind of let them do their own thing and not really help either of them during the match,” Bunyard said.
