The wrestling team kicked off the new season with an inter squad meet. An inter squad meet consists of matches preformed only by LHS wrestlers and the team wrestles each other based on each other’s certification.
“Certification is where you weigh in and you have to be around a certain weight and then they do a body fat test and hydration test, to let us know what weight we could go to safely,” senior Cole Ritche said.
Wrestlers have to certify before they are allowed to wrestle, so no harm is caused to anyone while wrestling.
“They have to make sure they are weighed in and not too heavy for their weight class, so it doesn’t hurt the other person they are wrestling or themselves,” team manager senior Riley Shelton said.
Certification includes a variety of tests.
“You have to pass a hydration test, you have to get a body fat measurement and a weight,” head wrestling coach Mike Hammer said. “They put this into a calculator computer program and it tells every kid their minimum weight class that they can wrestle. It also tells them when they can wrestle the minimum weight class. Certification is something that is relatively new in high school wrestling, it’s been around for a few years and kids have to certify before they can even wrestle.”
Junior Michael Shelton thought the inter squad meet would have a beneficial outcome. He compared it to the football team’s midnight scrimmage.
“I think it’s going to be pretty good, were all going to learn a little something, The freshmen are going to learn how we handle our duals and how everything is ran here at Liberty. And I think it will be pretty good and we’ll see what everyone has,” Shelton said. “Basically what it is, is just basically like a practice match or dual, as we’d call it. It’s almost like a scrimmage, like the whole football team does a midnight scrimmage against each other and it’s basically like our midnight scrimmage.”
The LHS inter squad meet was used to determine which team the wrestlers make.
“We pair up the wrestlers near the weight classes that they want to wrestle and then they usually wrestle two matches. We evaluate them, based on what they do for the depth chart. We decide whom originally is on varsity or JV, by how they preform at the inter squad meet and then after that, the kids get to challenge off,” Hammer said.
The LHS wrestling team has been working hard to prepare for this year’s wrestling season.
“It’s been a lot of fun, we’ve done a lot of hard workouts. We’ve put a lot of hard work in, so it will be fun to see how hard and far we go this year,” freshman Zach Ervie said.
The inter squad meet showed the coaches the skills of this year’s team.
“We’re very young and what we saw as a coaching staff is what we expected, a lot of raw potential in our squad, so hopefully we can just build on that,” Hammer said. “Our goal is to get better. Our goal this year is to be as good as we would be next year and get there before next year.”