The Buccaneer boys and girls Wrestling team begins its season with a quad meet on Dec. 6 at 5 p.m. against Plainwell and Hopkins. The Bucs are optimistic about another great season after making it to districts and sending four wrestlers to states last year.
“Our kids have been training really hard for three weeks of practice and two weeks of conditioning so about five weeks,” coach Vincent Gervais said. “It’s more or less an opportunity to see what they’ve done over the past couple of weeks to prepare.”
Although they lost many senior wrestlers from last year, the team has viewed it as a new opportunity for this upcoming season rather than a loss.
“We graduated a really good class of kids last year which opened up some spots for kids,” Gervais said. “I keep telling people that we’re gonna be young but tough. There’s a lot of inexperience, but it’s the kids that have had a lot of success at the JV level and we’re excited to see what they can do at the varsity level.”
Although victory is important, the Bucs are focusing on improvement and relentless effort throughout this upcoming season.
“The biggest thing is just giving their best effort one hundred percent of the time,” Gervais said. “We are retraining the way that they view competition because obviously, we want them to want to win every time they step on the match, but we also want them to fall in love with competition and just give their best effort no matter what that looks like.”