On Saturday, Varsity Wrestling competed in the Eastern States Athletic Conference tournament at Deerfield Academy.
Several wrestlers won matches. Co-captain Ihsan Yumak ’25 at 132 pounds and Andrew Lee ’26 at 165 pounds both went undefeated in their three matches.
Nick Lucana ’26 at 113 pounds had the fastest pin of the day, pinning his opponent in 27 seconds. Lucas Ruiz ’26 at 138 pounds went 2-1 in his three matches. Also competing were Keven Luiru ’27, Shaan Patel ’27, Ethan Woo ’24, Nouri Badrous ’25, co-captain Adam Wright ’24, Aimee Carrasco ’24, and Cayden Kim ’26.
“It was overall a great effort from the team, and everyone seems to be improving,” said Yumak. “We saw that in our close matchup with Choate, where they beat us in a close dual with a final score of 42-39, which is a great improvement from the near 20 point margin earlier in the year. As for the other matchups, although we didn’t win a lot on paper, there were definitely a lot of gritty and promising matches. I’m very happy with a lot of the performances I saw.”
The meet was a so-called quad meet, contested under a round-robin format. All four teams—Hotchkiss, Deerfied, Choate, and Exeter—matched up against each other during the course of the event.
This meant that most wrestlers were called upon to wrestle in two or three matches.
Multiple matches on the same day presented a unique challenge for the wrestlers, said Head Coach Cooper Puls ’11. “When preparing for a meet against three other schools instead of just one, there is a lot less individual scouting and a lot more physical preparation,” he added.
Mr. Puls also acknowledged the relative inexperience of his team this year. He said, “A lot of new kids are just getting used to wrestling one time, so to tell them that they’re now going to wrestle three times is a lot. The best thing in my experience that you can do to prepare for that is to help them be in the best physical condition that they can be in, so we focus a lot on that in the weeks leading up to tournaments and multi-school meets.”
The team has several new wrestlers this year. Mr. Puls said the focus for the meet was on building experience. “The goal is to expose our younger wrestlers to more wrestling, more teams, and more styles of wrestling so they can learn,” he said.
