Malden team wrestling against the Everett team. Photo from the Blue and Gold archives.
This season, Malden High School’s (MHS) wrestling team started off strong and they plan to stay like that for the whole season. With a new meet every week the wrestlers have built on their success to reach their goals as individuals and as a team. They hope to improve more this season and make it to States.
This year the wrestling team is combined with students from Everett High School and Chelsea High School. Nicole Zeng, a junior at MHS, thinks it is nice to have different people from other cities because everyone has a lot of fun. She said, “there are drastically different personalities and it is just more fun with more people.”
Zeng feels positive about the future of this season and she believes that all the newcomers are doing good. There are only two girls on the team but she still feels positive that they will do well.
Zeng states that “people who are inexperienced at cutting weight should just worry about focusing on correctly doing their moves and working on their technique rather than cutting weight because it’s really hard to do.” For this season she thinks that they should work on their conditioning more and focus on being tougher both physically and mentally because wrestling is a really hard sport and it is 90% mental.
One of the wrestling captains this season is Aidan Jordan. He said that they are a fairly new team so they are trying to build up slowly. Despite being a new team, Jordan feels that they will do good. Moving forward, Jordan wants the team to go slowly, review things, learn more things and just keep on practicing.
So far the wrestling team has been doing really well and have been winning some of their matches at the meets.
Covid has made it difficult for this wrestling season. Jordan said, “it is kind of harder with the masks because they make it harder to breathe… and during the meet, there were a lot of timeouts because the masks were being ripped off.” He believes that it is one of the major difficulties.
Going forward Zeng thinks that they are going to do really well this season and she feels good about it. Jordan looks forward to doing well this season and thinks they will be fine in the future. He believes that the team will continue to get better.
