By Tynan Schwartz

The Roundup

Coming off of Cesar Alvarez ‘22 winning second and Thomas Derr ‘19 making it to quarters at Freakshow 2019 the wrestling team is off to a great start with Head Coach Mr. Wayne Catan and Coach Mr. Jose Leyba ’94 have high hopes for this year.

With the preseason training being difficult and the in-season training being even more difficult, Mr. Catan hopes to train and hone the wrestlers to place at state or win the state title saying the “..goal this year is to have four or five all-state student-athletes.”

Mr. Leyba, on the other hand, has the much more long term goal of having multiple wrestlers stay on the team for the next four years and wrestling for their full time at Brophy.

The wrestling team in the past has struggled to keep seniors with last year’s team only having one senior. However, this year they have four seniors. Mr. Leyba still says that one of the senior’s goal “should be to get to the state tournament,” in Arizona.

Both Mr. Catan and Mr. Leyba have high hopes for their varsity roster of Ryan Lin ’22 at 113 pounds, Cesar Avelar ’22 at 120 pounds, Daniel Roosevelt ’21 at 126 pounds, Ben Goettl ’20 at 132 pounds, Henry Barber ’20 at 145 pounds, Noah Jacobs ’20 at 160 pounds, TJ Broyles ’22 at 160 pounds, David Sweetman ‘23 at 170 pounds, Thomas Derr ’20 at 182 pounds and Alexandro Suarez-Ibarra ’21 and Jose Villegas ’21 at 195 pounds.

The team also struggles to get members due to the magnitude of sports going on during the winter season. With wrestling being one of the winter sports competing with the soccer, rugby, quidditch, crew, hockey and esports teams at Brophy, it causes the problem of not having a full varsity roster with the team missing a 106-pound wrestler, a 220 wrestler and a heavyweight wrestler.

Tournament wise, there will be four tournaments during the wrestling season with Leyba hoping everyone from Freshman to Varsity to go to every one of the tournaments and wrestle at least one match.