Wrestling team adapts to COVID restrictions

Calum Shank
Video Editor

With the impact of COVID, the women’s and men’s wrestling teams have been impacted. According to Coach James LeMay, the team has a lot of adjustments with COVID.

Now that the team is able to have a season, players gather daily to practice on the close contact sport.

LeMay said, “All of our wrestlers give it their all, I feel like that’s all you can really ask for.”

“I haven’t changed the way I wrestle, but knowing this is my last year and my season could be over at any point has helped me with having a mindset and leaving everything on the mat,” senior Hannah Jansen said about how she has changed her wrestling, especially with the impact of COVID.

“Being strong mentally is important because it’s easy for someone to get in their own head before a match and not wrestle like themselves because of it. Mental toughness is also important because when both you and your opponent are tired, whoever is stronger mentally is more likely to win,” Jansen said

The wrestling team practices for eight hours a week from Monday to Thursday. All of these hours are with masks.

“Wearing masks is a big difference, because not every school wears masks, but we wear them, and it makes us all have to be a lot more conditioned so that we can go a full three periods. It is much harder to breath in masks,” Jansen said about how wearing masks could impact wrestling performance and difficulty for the wrestler.

“We also have to take a lot of precautions outside of wrestling, because we have to be careful who we are around outside of the wrestling room because being exposed to COVID at this point in the season would be season ending. That is hard because something not completely in your control could end your season,” Jansen said about the precautions placed to control COVID on the wrestling team.

At the Class I Districts on Feb. 6, the Webster Groves woman wrestlers got 10th out of 22 teams in District I.