A year older and stronger, expectations high for Raiders

MEDFORD WRESTLING PREVIEW

With their youngest team in some time, the Medford Raiders still got some things done in the 2021-22 wrestling season by earning a share of the Great Northern Conference championship with five individual champs, taking third in the WIAA regional tournament and sending five wrestlers to Division 2 sectional competition with one advancing to state.

With virtually the entire varsity roster back, and some solid additions as well, seventh-year head coach Brandon Marcis and his Raiders are anxious to see how the next step in the development of this still young squad will look.

“We look pretty good,” Marcis said Monday. “We went from being a young team last year to having some more experience this year. We only lost two seniors last year who cracked the lineup sometimes. We return most of our kids. When everybody is at their ideal weight we should have a full lineup. We’re looking for big things. I don’t think that we’re on anybody’s radar, but I think we’re going to be.”

The Raiders get their first chance to make some noise tonight, Thursday, when they host the always-solid Neillsville-Greenwood-Loyal Co-op in a 7 p.m. dual meet at Raider Hall. It’s one of just two home meets currently on this year’s schedule. The Raiders then have a busy Saturday with a full day of dual meets at the Wausau West Invitational, which starts at 10 a.m.

Depth has certainly returned to the program with 26 names appearing on the team’s early-season roster, according to Marcis. Over half of them are returning letter winners from last year’s squad that went 5-0 in GNC duals and 8-4 overall. In fact, there might be too much depth in some stretches of the lineup, which could result in some tough decisions for the coaches at times and some tough intrasquad competition at times for those spots.

A handful of JV tournaments are on the schedule to help get more wrestlers more matches.

“Our motto is still attitude is everything and we’re going all-in for the team,” Marcis said. “Guys are pretty receptive to that idea. They know that even though it’s an individual sport, we still have to do things to support our team which, in the short run, may seem like it’s hurting us individually, but the better the team is, the better the individual is and we’ve always kind of run it like that and that’s how we’re going to keep on doing it.”

The core of returning wrestlers includes GNC and regional champion Thaddeus Sigmund, a senior; GNC and regional champion Gage Losiewicz, a sophomore and Medford’s lone state qualifier last winter; senior Jude Stark, a GNC champion and regional runner-up; junior Logan Kawa, a GNC and regional runnerup and sophomore Owen Higgins, a GNC champion and third-place regional finisher, just to name a few.

Where everyone will eventually fit is obviously a work in progress that’s in its beginning stages.

“The experience that they gained will definitely help them out this year,” Marcis said. “I just think a lot of the little things or mistakes that younger kids make, hopefully we kind of clean that up. We had a good team camp this summer, had some good participation. I see good things happening that way. A couple of kids kind of spread out, so the lineup should look good. We just have to focus on what we do.

“We had wrestle-offs on Friday and one of the things that I want to see in wrestle-offs is really competitive wrestling with not a lot of pins, and we had that,” he added. “We had a lot of kids pushing each other. Wrestle-offs were very competitive and that’s the best thing that we could possibly want for our team to have guys pushing each other every day.”

In this first week of competition, Marcis is looking at freshman Broden Schilling filling the 106-pound slot, while sophomore Nick Malchow is at 113 pounds. He was fourth in the GNC at 106 last year. Sigmund starts at 120. He is certainly one of the team’s leaders and is looking for big things after a 33-7 junior season at 113 pounds. Seniors Itsael Medina and Matt Gebert and sophomore Rylan Zoellick are among the candidates vying for time at 126 early on.

The 132-pound weight class is one that’s a bit crowded to start the year with Stark, who was 24-9 a year ago, and Higgins, who was 18-9, there for the time being, though Marcis expects them to separate soon. Sophomore Parker Lissner is certainly a capable candidate at 138 pounds after going 5-6 at 132 last year.

Junior Cory Lindahl is back at 145 pounds, where he was third in the regional last season and finished 9-13.

To start the season,152 and 160 pounds is where things are a bit complicated for now, Marcis said. There’s Losiewicz, who went 33-10 in his solid freshman season that ended in Madison, talented sophomores Paxton Rothmeier and Evan Wilkins, who both got some big wins late last year for the Raiders, senior Blake Schilling, who wrestled in the regional at 152 pounds last year, a junior newcomer in Kaleb Dassow and one of Medford’s experienced incoming freshmen Willam Bartnik.

Kawa locks down a spot at 170 pounds as the season gets underway. He went 2614 last year and very nearly won the GNC title at 170.

“I’m hoping as the season goes on, I have a couple of them weighing in at about 160, that they can beef up a little bit to help fill our lineup out between 170 and 182,” Marcis said. “Because once we get to the top it gets a little bit thinner, but we have some younger guys that do have experience. John Bartnik, he’s going to be up there at 182, he’s got wrestling experience. He’s wrestled for awhile. We have Jaxon Fallos, he’s at 220. He’s got experience. But I expect him to go down.”

Junior Braxton Weissmiller may get some heavyweight matches early but is expected to drop down to 220 pounds at some point, leaving an opportunity for junior Max Dietzman, a first-year wrestler, who has shown his athletic ability in sports like football and baseball with the Raiders. Marcis also mentioned junior Ozan Karaasian, a foreign exchange student who is new to wrestling but has a lot of strength and has looked good in practice.

“Max looks great,” Marcis said. “He’s a good, natural athlete. When he was doing his wrestle-offs I saw him doing things exactly the way they were taught, so that’s pretty promising.”

Filling a full lineup every night should give Medford opportunities to score well, especially in GNC duals, which take on a new format this year. With some of the smaller rosters teams have had in recent years, most GNC duals will be held as part of four-team quads where teams will have two duals per meet. Medford’s quads are at Rhinelander and Mosinee. The Raiders will host Mosinee in a regular dual meet on Jan. 12.

“That actually did open us up to go to a couple different things outside of our conference,” Marcis said of the quads. “We added another team dual at Shiocton. Last year we got canceled at Eau Claire North, so we added Shawano. That was a good tournament that we’re going back to. We’re going to a quad in Altoona. It’s good for us because in the long run, I think we’re going to get a few matches for all of the kids. It does cut back on our home dual meets though.”

The other big schedule change comes on the first weekend of post-season competition. The WIAA approved a “super regional” format for that first weekend, which basically combines two regionals from the old format into one meet.

Marcis said there are mixed reviews among Division 2 and 3 wrestling coaches. On one hand, it will make for more competitive regional meets but the ultimate goal was to create more opportunities for wrestlers to get to state and the WIAA didn’t allow that, keeping Division 2 and 3 representation at 12 per weight class and four teams for team state.

“The original idea for doing that super regional was, as a result of changing the regionals and the sectionals, we’d get the same amount of teams and individuals as D-1 gets because if you look at participation numbers they’re about the same,” Marcis said. “Right now D-1 sends 16 and we send 12. The big idea was we’re going to do this super regional and combine these things so we can send four kids from each sectional and have full brackets. The WIAA kind of met us in the middle on that but they didn’t do the other part where we wanted equal representation, so we’re still working on that as Division 2 and 3 wrestling coaches.”

But in December, the post-season is something Marcis said the Raiders can’t be focused on.

“Overall, it’s pretty optimistic for us having a full lineup and having more experience,” he said. “We can’t get too high and we can’t get too low. We just have to keep our expectations in check and wrestle every dual and every tournament day by day. We’re just going to worry about the things we can control and the things that we can control are going to practice, eating right, passing our classes and getting ‘er done.”