You’re an up-and-coming middle-school wrestler and you’re moments from facing a hotshot kid from Arizona in a national tournament.
You’re feeling nervous, tense, apprehensive and all those other emotions a kid entering the biggest match of his young life would experience.
Right? Maybe not, if your name is Kelly Kubec.
Kubec is on the edge of the mat warming up, waiting for another match to end, when suddenly he turns to his coach, Brent Barnes, and asks, “Who do you think the Seahawks are going to take in the draft today?”
Which might have caused some coaches’ jaws to drop. Not Barnes.
“That’s just Kelly,” he said recently. “Always engaged.”
That story played itself out in a tournament back in the Midwest several years ago. Kubec was an eighth-grader in the Lake Stevens school district, Barnes was — and still is — the wrestling coach at Lake Stevens High School.
Kubec lost the match that day, and the kid who beat him? He went on to bigger things. Last summer, at the age of 21, Henry Cejudo became the youngest American ever to win an Olympic wrestling gold medal.
Keith Kubec, Kelly’s father, said he has heard a “lot of stories like that” about his son, but never that one. “He’s just a knucklehead that way,” Keith joked. “I love hearing stories about him.”
Because they usually have a happy ending.
On the day of that big match against Cejudo, after overhearing the remark about the Seahawks, Kelly’s older brother, Tony, ordered him to “get your head in the game.”
Looking at his record, it would seem that has never been a problem for Kelly. In high school, after a third-place finish his freshman year, he won three straight Class 4A state championships.
His four-year record was 144-11.
Now, as a red-shirt freshman at Oregon State, he just keeps winning.
And every time he steps on the mat in the 133-pound class, kids with glittering high school backgrounds are his opponents.
Even at practice, “every guy in the room has won a state title or done something to qualify him for wrestling at this level,” Kelly Kubec said in a telephone interview.
Once a week he tries to wrestle one of the Beavers’ assistant coaches, and that means going up against a former NCAA champion. “He’ll beat up on me,” Kubec said, “and that doesn’t sound like a very pleasing thing, but he’s really good at critiquing me.”
And so while he comes away a “little sore” from these matches, Kubec also comes away a little smarter.
He learns quickly.
Barnes recalled Kubec volunteering to move up a weight class so he could wrestle Michael Mangrum of Auburn-Riverside in a high school match his senior year. “Kelly has always wanted to compete against the best to see where he is,” Barnes said, “and he wanted the challenge of facing Mangrum. It didn’t bother him a bit.”
Though Kubec lost the match, Barnes said he was “immediately telling me what he did wrong. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, man, I lost,’ it was ‘Oh, man, I should have done this.’ He’s always thinking about getting better.”
He has to because the stiff competition never lets up. Already this season, Kubec — with an 8-1 record — has beaten a University of Nebraska wrestler who was 128-1 in high school with four state championships.
And Friday night, he takes on the fifth-ranked wrestler in NCAA Division I, Andrew Hochstrasser of No.13-ranked Boise State in Boise. “He,” Barnes said of Hochstrasser, “will be a challenge (for Kubec) for three years.”
Which Kubec relishes, even though he once lost to Hochstrasser in an open tournament. “I don’t look back,” he said. “I’m looking forward.”
Even when his father called and wanted to talk about his son’s most recent win last weekend, Kelly already had his eyes set on the Boise State match. “I talked to Kelly this morning,” Keith said last Sunday, “and he’s so excited to wrestle him again.”
After a long bus ride home, the Beavers host No. 5 Missouri on Sunday. And next month, Kubec wrestles the current fourth-ranked wrestler in the nation, Nick Fanthorpe of Iowa State.
Each match prepares him for his ultimate goal: an NCAA championship.
Not next year. Not the year after.
This year.
“I know I can win a national championship this year,” Kubec said. “I would hate to have expectations to ‘almost’ get there. That wouldn’t be fair to myself, like I want to get close. I want to win it. Not put myself all the way out there just to get close.”
His approach to taking on the best of the best? Not to worry about what they’ve achieved. “If I do my job,” he said, “I’ll win.”
That’s what his current coach preaches. And Jim Zalesky knows a thing or two about winning. As a collegiate wrestler at Iowa, he was a three-time NCAA champion. He then went on to coach the Hawkeyes to three NCAA titles.
Kubec realizes he has been blessed with great coaches. His high school coach, Barnes, has taken Lake Stevens to six state championships and seems loaded for another run this year. And now Kubec has Zalesky, who was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2004.
“He’s very intense and has very high expectations,” Kubec said of Zalesky, who took over the OSU program in 2006. “I’m extremely happy he’s my coach.”
Zalesky likes the progress Kubec has made in his one-plus years on campus. “He’s gotten a lot better since he came here,” the coach said.
Asked what separates the best wrestlers from the rest of the field, Zalesky said, “the biggest thing is the effort you want to put into it. He is very competitive. He works real hard.”
About that lofty personal goal, Zalesky said, “I haven’t seen why he can’t be” a national champion.
After all, Kubec has been winning championships since the age of 5.
Even back then, his coach — a guy named Ron Bessemer who was an exceptional teacher — had an inkling that Kubec was a cut above most youngsters. “One day Ron said, ‘All these kids are good kids, but there’s something special about Kelly,’” Keith recalled.
One thing that set him apart was his competitive nature. “Fierce competitor,” Keith said. “We put a basketball hoop up in the backyard, and he’d go out there and shoot hoops for hours. He had to be the best at everything. Ping-Pong, darts, everything.”
Kubec got to vote in his first presidential election this year. He’s even one-for-one in selecting winners.
What made the whole deal even sweeter is that he got to chat with president-elect Barrack Obama’s brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s brother, who is the new basketball coach at Oregon State.
“It’s cool to have him here,” Kubec said of Robinson. “It would be awesome to have him (Obama) come to a basketball game.”
Or maybe a wrestling match. “I doubt that that’s going to happen,” Kubec said with a laugh.
But if it did, might Kubec, as he walked onto the mat, mutter, “I wonder what he had for dinner tonight?”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
