A large increase in wrestlers has made the team stronger than ever, covering almost all weight classes and leaving athletes ready for a new year.

“This team now would smoke the team last year,” says Head Coach Jim Mason.

The Skyline wrestling team is determined to face Catholic Central, last year’s state champions. Mason says his top picks for the state championship are Connor Gillilland (‘25), Peter Werns (‘27), Jayden Shaw (‘25), Titus Reed (‘28), and Liam Gillilland (‘28).

Mason is confident that the team is “on the cusp of doing great things.” The team is currently 6-5 as of 2/7/25 and their morale is high. “We’ve been doing pretty good,” says Liam Gillilland (‘28). “We had a couple of good tournaments.” Assistant Coach Greg Stauffer agrees: “It’s been good. [Although] it’s been a long season, they just try to keep working hard and trying to improve.”

The wrestling team practices six days a week every week, even on breaks. Their workouts are two and a half hours long: a warm up with laps around the track; sprawling, a defensive tactic and defensive drills; and light sparring. They focus on form and timing and offensive tactics and drills, such as taking shots to takedown the opponent. Then the real work of full power sparring starts, they use all their effort for hours.

After practice Radovan Krstovic (‘27) explained, “I’ve lost [over] five pounds in one practice.”

Support the team by coming to their next wrestling tournament on 2/22/25.