Wellington High School Wrestling Team Celebrates A Record-Setting Season Story by Deborah Welky • Photos by Abner Pedraza and courtesy Wellington Wrestling
This year’s Wellington High School wrestling team has been busy shattering school records. In the 2013-14 season that just ended, the bar was raised for future WHS wrestlers. The Wolverine wrestlers captured titles at the conference, county and district tournaments, before placing second at the regional tournament and 12th at the state tournament. “This year was by far the most fun I’ve ever had coaching,” said head coach Travis Gray, who taught the sport for four years in his home state of Minnesota before coming to Wellington eight years ago. “I looked forward to every practice. There were no issues; they were all good kids. Wrestling is a hard, grueling sport, but when we can go into the practice room and we’re all laughing but working at the same time, that’s what it’s all about.” It wasn’t like that just a few years ago, when Gray set out to create a championship team “Where I’m from, wrestling is much bigger,” he said. “I started wrestling when I was 5 years old. But these kids had a disadvantage in Palm Beach County. It’s one of the only counties in the state that doesn’t offer wrestling in middle school. So when these kids got to high school, hardly one of them had ever stepped on a mat.” That reality set Gray back a bit. “It was tough to really do as much as I wanted to do right off the bat,” he 38
May 2014 |wellington the magazine| 10th Anniversary
said. “The program took a lot of patience and practice and growing over the years. But Florida wrestling is picking up.” This year, Gray’s program is just about where he wants it. With an 18-1 record, three local titles and regional runner-up, seven Wolverine wrestlers were skilled enough to compete at the state championships in mid-February in Lakeland, setting a school record for number of qualifiers. When the dust settled, three of those qualifiers had placed, shattering another school record. The 12th-place finish for the team was also better than the school has ever done. “When you’re brand new and not having success, it takes perseverance,” Gray said. “I have to hand it to them — they accomplished a lot. It’s also notable that, as a team, they had a collective grade point average of 3.1 — fifth-highest in the state for a wrestling team.” This year’s team captains were Briar Macfarlane (who placed fifth at state),