The EWU Wrestling Club had a school year highlighted by an increase in participation and success in competition.
Wrestling used to be an Eastern Washington University school sport. However, EWU cut the sport, along with the baseball program, after the 1990 season.
“It pretty much just disappeared,” said Nathan Shaber, the club president. “Now, we’re rebuilding as a club program.”
This school year, the club had a much larger number of wrestlers than in the past.
“Last year, we had three consistent members,” Shaber said. “This year we had up to 12.”
The influx of new members also enabled the club to add a new team.
“Eastern had never before had a women’s program, so we started that as well this year,” Shaber said. “There was always tentatively some interest, but since this program wasn’t established, they were afraid to join. It just took us having one or two girls to get committed and now we’ve had several more commitments for next year.”
One of the first girls to join was Adrienne Chastain, who is now the women’s team captain and club vice president. With the women’s team becoming established, she tried to convince other girls at Eastern to join the club.
“I would stop girls on campus or people that I knew that wrestled,” she said. “I would ask if they wanted to join. A lot of people said no, but we did end up having a couple girls just come and practice and not compete.”
Chastain said that the club now has three consistent members, as well as a handful of girls who occasionally come to practices. Next year, the club expects even more.
“We’ve had about five girls commit that are either seniors in high school or are transferring from other universities,” she said.
In their first year of existence, the women’s team sent two wrestlers to the National Collegiate Wrestling Championships. To qualify for the national tournament, men have to place in the top 5 at the NCWA NW Conference Championship meet, while all women who competed at the conference championship meet qualified due to a smaller number of participants.
However, the EWU women did more than compete. The team brought two women’s wrestlers to the meet, Chastain and junior Talina Hall. Both earned third place in their weight classes.
The men’s team had a strong showing as well. Of the eight men who competed, six qualified for the national championship meet. Sophomore Braden Smith was the highest-placing EWU wrestler with a second-place finish in the 185lb weight class.
Smith said that while the team didn’t end up having their best meet at the national tournament, the experience was still enjoyable.
“We had 64-man brackets from like 165 different universities. There were D1, D2, D3, and JUCO (teams),” he said. “So you can wrestle people who go to these really big universities and we’re just from little Eastern Washington.”
Chastain echoed his sentiments about the national tournament.
“Oh my gosh, it was surreal,” she said. “It was awesome wrestling people from different colleges all over the U.S. I wrestled someone from Grand Canyon and Colorado.”
The club’s goal is to continue to increase the number of members and the visibility of the program.
“Growth is the biggest thing right now, because (the club) has been so small for so long,” Shaber said. “It’s just getting people in the door that are interested in wrestling and want to keep having fun with the sport.”
