A year after disbanding program, Murphy fields wrestling team

Published 10:24 pm Monday, January 19, 2015

A poster hanging in Archbishop Murphy wrestling coach Blaine Gilchrist-Smith’s office shows the members of his 2014-15 team dressed in Western regalia under the heading “Back in the saddle.”

The Murphy wrestling program, established in 2003, disbanded last season when Gilchrist-Smith couldn’t get enough wrestlers to field a team. This year, his recruiting efforts were more successful, and the result has been a new beginning for the Wildcats, who proudly wear sweatshirts that read: “Murphy Wrestling reestablished 2014.”

“That’s the whole idea,” Gilchrist-Smith said. “We lost it, now we’re back. It’s going to get bigger and better like it was initially.”

The wrestlers are excited to be back on the mat. Several, such as senior captain Sean Callaghan, wrestled at other high schools last season. Callaghan and former Wildcat Foster Wade competed at Stanwood High School, where Wade won a state title at 195 pounds.

“It was kind of weird,” Callaghan said. “It was nice being back there, but it’s nice being back here at your actual school. I love Stanwood, but it’s good to be back here.”

Others took a year off from wrestling. Senior Reagan Gordon spent the winter sports season recovering from football and working in the weight room. He’s thrilled to have the opportunity to compete again during his final year of high school.

“Not having last year really sucked. You missed it,” Gordon said. “Coming back this year, you just have to pick up where you left off. You kind of get back in the swing of things.”

Missing just one year can set a wrestler back quite a bit, Gilchrist-Smith said.

“We have a lot of students who missed a year completely,” the coach said. “It takes a long time to develop the skills that you need to be competitive at the varsity level. It definitely set us back. … But they’ve done a really good job. They’ve worked hard and improved a lot.”

The Wildcats got to show their peers what wrestling is all about in a daytime exhibition match against Lakewood on Dec. 12 that was designed to showcase the sport to the student body.

“They’re starting to embrace it a lot more here,” Callaghan said of the students. “Before, when we had a team, nobody really knew about it but now they’ve heard about it and a bunch of kids have started coming to matches. It’s pretty fun.”

As one might suspect, there have been ups and downs for Murphy in its first season back.

“Our No. 1 goal is to get reestablished and we did that, so we can check it off the list. The other thing is we want to be competitive,” Gilchrist-Smith said. “… We want to make sure we can compete against them. And we have been for the most part.

“We got killed against Sultan (on Jan. 8). But they’re very good and we’re not at that level yet. But that’s where we’d like to get. We want to be more like Sultan, as far as being accomplished as a team. That will come in time.”

The wrestlers and their coach say there’s pressure being a team from Archbishop Murphy, which expects success from its athletic programs.

“We’re so successful here, athletically and academically speaking, that I think it’s probably tough, psychologically, to come in here as a freshman, tryout for wrestling and then get beat in your matches,” Gilchrist-Smith said. “That’s going to happen. You’re going to get beat. And all of your classmates are on teams that are winning. That’s hard to do. … You’ve got to be patient. It’s going to take at least two years.”

Watching those new wrestlers is fun for the Wildcat veterans, who remember when they first started out.

“We’ve had a lot of new kids. It’s been a lot of working on the basics and stuff,” said Callaghan, who’s been wrestling for better than 10 years. “It’s really fun to pass the sport on down to a bunch of new kids and see a lot of potential in the new guys who just scrap. It’s really cool. Especially the kids who wrestled their sophomore year, but weren’t able to wrestle their junior year but are back. It’s fun to watch them get back in the swing of things.”

Some wrestlers, including Callaghan and junior Euiseok Jeong, hope to make a run at a state title. Others, such as Gordon, “just want to have fun and know that I gave it my all, no matter what place I take.”

Regardless of how far they get, the biggest thing for the Murphy wrestlers is to make sure what happened last year doesn’t happen again.

“It was kind of a sad thing,” Jeong said. “But now it’s time to rebuild our team.

“We have a new start.”