Ozaukee’s wrestlers make progress

The only state qualifier from last year’s Ozaukee High School wrestling team graduated, and this year’s team is motivated to make its own mark.

Jovan Lopez graduated after earning two sixth-place medals at 285 pounds, and coach Ted Schanen is looking for the next stars.

“We’ve chosen ‘uncommon by choice’ as our theme for the season. I feel like the strengths of this group is rooted in the fact that they are pretty internally motivated. They’ve chosen to wrestle because they want to. That internal drive goes a long way,” he said.

“Our incoming freshmen are good athletes, smart kids, and are tough. This is starting as a fun group of kids to coach. They are very good at making adjustments. Very few of our freshmen really pushed for doing a lot of tournaments in middle school, so the extra matches of a high school season is allowing for a lot of progress quickly.”

All but one of the 10-member squad is made up of freshmen and sophomores.

Todd Bell at 144 pounds is the only senior.

Three sophomores include Jake Delleree at 113 or 120 pounds, Otto Schmitz at 165 pounds and Murphy Brown at 175.

“I don’t think wrestling ever gets easy, but our returning sophomores have made it through their toughest season and have matured a lot,” Schanen said. “They have put in a lot of effort to build themselves into athletes capable of hanging with older wrestlers. I’m excited to see how the year of experience translates into this season.”

The freshmen include Sterling Schanen at 106 pounds, Sam Bertram at 126 or 132, Wyatt Borchardt at 132 or 138, Fritz Hoffmann at 132 or 138, Thomas Dieringer at 190 and Gustavo Hernandez at 215 or 285.

“It will be hard to compete as a team since we don’t fill enough weights, but this is a really cohesive group. I’m proud to take this team to compete, and it will be fun to see how far they go,” coach Schanen said.

The Warriors host a triple dual on Tuesday, Jan. 6.