The CIF preliminary match for wrestling occurred Friday, Feb. 8. Eight out of 14 FUHS varsity wrestlers qualified for CIF individually, marking the second year in a row that wrestling qualified for CIF as a team.

Qualifiers included (in alphabetical order): senior Isaul Castaneda (our Freeway League champion), junior Josh Hanson, senior Jonatan Jimenez, junior Carlos Peña, junior Rolando Sanabria

, senior Jacob Saucedo, senior Dylan Scarberry, and senior Joshua Tan-Torres.

For many of the wrestlers, CIF was a new and exciting experience because they had the opportunity to compete against people that they hadn’t wrestled before.

All of the wrestlers worked hard this past year in order to succeed. Wrestlers train by conditioning and practicing “skill sets.” This work benefited wrestlers later during CIF.

“Skill sets are [when] we practice our basic techniques,” Saucedo said. “We train our bodies to be prepared to deal with sore spots and pains. And we train to keep our stamina up and to take the right steps every time.”

The wrestlers knew that in order to qualify for CIF, they would have to practice a lot.

“Our team has conditioned harder than we usually do,” Sanabria said. “We’ve been working on technique.”

Despite the individual aspects of the sport, the FUHS wrestling team is well-bonded.

“Every day at practice we try to make eachother laugh and keep up the optimism in the room,” Pena said. “If someone were to be down, we’d always be there to support each other.”

The wrestlers see each other so often that they are as close as brothers. A family aspect in a sport makes the time spent practicing seem less like a chore.

“We’re more of a family than a team,” Jimenez said. “We take care of each other.”