Here at Forest Hills Central, twenty-five sports are offered for both genders at all levels of competition. These sport offerings range from dance and rugby all the way to the more traditional sports like football, basketball, and baseball. Many of them are similar, and in order to train and prepare, athletes from different sports train in pretty similar ways. However, there is one sport where preparation is quite unique: the sport of wrestling.

In wrestling, wrestlers compete in weight classes, meaning they go against other athletes that have similar weights as them. This is done to make it fair and obviously keep everyone safe. On the day of each meet, wrestlers will be weighed prior to their matches to ensure that they are eligible to compete in their specific weight classes.

This specific aspect of wrestling is quite unique, and with it comes some strategy. Wrestlers need to maintain their weights throughout the entire season, and they sometimes also need to cut a few pounds in order to qualify for certain weight classes. If you are at the top of your weight class, not to say you automatically win, but you might have a better chance than being at the bottom of your weight class. If a wrestler is close to the cutoff between two weight classes, he or she will try to lose, otherwise known as cut, in order to make it to the lower of the two.

For most athletes, cutting or gaining weight is not the issue, but rather it is maintaining the weight. For Trevor Williams, a junior wrestler for the FHC Rangers, he has found a groove that works for him during the wrestling season.

“Personally, I can eat anything I want to, just in moderation,” he told me when I asked about his eating habits during the season. He then continued by saying he eats “more fruits and vegetables during the season and less carbs.”

During the season, wrestlers like Trevor have to be conscientious of what they are eating and make sure that they are watching their diet in order to meet qualifying requirements and standards for competition. No other athlete in any other sport here at FHC has to worry about this, which makes wrestling quite unique. People who do not have a keen knowledge of wrestling could say that changing diets so suddenly, cutting or increasing weight, or increasing or decreasing food intake might cause health problems and could be dangerous to the health of the athlete. I talked to another wrestler in order to see his opinion.

Alex Korff, another FHC wrestler, said that for him maintaining weight “is pretty safe and hard to get sick off of but does take a lot of eating to maintain the weight.”

Alex tries to increase his food intake right before his wrestling meets so that he can be as close to the required weight as possible. For other wrestlers, it can sometimes be the opposite, going a whole day before a meet without eating in order to become eligible for certain weight classes. Yes, this does sound risky, but with the proper education of how to do it the correct way, it can be accomplished safely.

Maintaining weight is unique and just as important off the mat as knowing what to do on the mat. It is far from a traditional way of preparing for matches, games, and events, but it is equally important as skill work and mental preparation.