2024_1204_1706

The head coach of the Republic County Buffalo's wrestling team, Adam Polanski, discusses his goals for the season, including winning the league tournament and bringing home medals from regionals. He highlights key returning wrestlers and expects them to perform well, as well as having high hopes for the senior wrestlers. On the girls' side, there is excitement about the larger group of girls participating and the opportunity to qualify for state. There are few newcomers on the boys' side due to the program's depth, but the team is highly competitive. Hello and welcome back to the Herd Herald podcast. Today we're here with the head coach of our Republic County Buffalo's FN team, Adam Polanski. How's it going? It's going pretty good. I'm just here to ask you a couple of questions about this year's season. What are your main goals for the team this season? Well I want to continue with our success we've had for the last few years. I'd like to be fighting for a league title. We haven't had a league tournament for a few years but last year we were the highest scoring team in our league at regionals. The last, I think, three or four years running now. So we have a league tournament this year, I'd like to win that and then hopefully bring home some hardware from regionals depending on where we go for regionals. All right. Boys and girls, by the way. Who are the key returning wrestlers and what impact do you expect them to have this year? We have four returning state qualifiers and one returning state placer. That's Owen. And then Cash, Graham, and Ethan are all returning state qualifiers. They took big steps last year. They need to take another big step this year. I'd like to see Owen battle for that top two spot in the state and then the other three guys make it back and be there for medals. And then we have a good group of seniors that didn't go to state last year. So Aiden Plancy, Jackson Voorhees, and Benedict Boxer are our seniors. And there again, I'm expecting big things from them to score a bunch of points for us at tournaments and have a shot at going to state. On the girls' side, Ava's back. She's our only girls' state qualifier. She's surrounded with a bigger group of girls this year. The girls' side get to wrestle. They don't have to wrestle 4A teams anymore at regionals. This is huge. And I think all of our girls have a shot at going to state, all nine of them. So we have some beginners, and they're going to take their lumps because they've never done it before. But I think by the end of the season, they're athletic and we'll be able to do pretty good. Do you have any planned out newcomers on the team this season? Like good expectations for them? You know, newcomer, well, on the girls' side, we've got newcomers because girls have never done it before. But on the boys' side, very few guys that didn't teach in their high have been in our program for a long time. We have a huge number of kids that have experience, and I'd hate to say they're newcomers, even our freshmen. But we're just so stacked up in our weights that it's going to be hard for our kids to find varsity spots. I mean, we're two, three deep in some weight classes where five, eight, ten years ago, we got kids that are second and third string that would be varsity wrestlers winning a lot of matches if they would be able to be on our varsity squad.