You play football , you play basketball, you play baseball- you don’t play wrestling. The sport often gets overlooked even though it’s the most physically, and mentally demanding sport. It’s important to shine a light on the sport of wrestling, especially inside John Dewey.
As the 2024-2025 wrestling season comes to an end with the team placing fourth in Brooklyn, let’s have a look back on some of the high’s and low’s this season. James Madison was the opening match of the year, foreshadowing the obstacles that happened so to speak with the referee going to Flatbush and not showing up for the first match of the year. The team ended up doing a friendly match to still get some real match experience, especially for the new guys. Once the season really started at the Murrow tournament, everyone got their first real matches of the season. The team’s 162 Yokub Mamatkulov won gold at his weight and senior Nicholas Kolaksazov placed second at his.
Then just as the season was kicking off, the worst possible start for John Dewey and its wrestlers came with the passing of coach Keith Conrade on the evening of December 12th. This tragedy had the utmost effect on the school, team and everyone that knew Coach. The lacrosse coach Mr.Khan graciously stepped up to coach this wrestling season so it wouldn’t come to an end when the devastation happened. Nonetheless, the passing had a huge effect on the team’s camaraderie and will to wrestle.
Dewey Wrestling takes home eight medals at the tournament held at James Madison on January 20th, 2024.
The teams first match without their coach was extremely difficult. Johnavan Sosa, a wrestler said “I think the team could have supported each other more after the coaches passed. It was hard to deal with and not easy to move on, but I believe the coach would have wanted us to keep pushing and the team kind of fell apart.” To add fuel to fire, two of the senior wrestlers got ringworm just as this all was unfolding.
Those left healthy on the team had to push through and keep wrestling. “Wrestling taught me mental toughness on a deeper level, cutting weight while preparing myself for a match was one of the hardest challenges I have faced in my life and getting through it made me a bigger and better person”, said Sameer Saleemi. A big part of this season was the team overcoming challenges but, let’s take a look at some of those successes. The team had some visitors to help come coach and get those hard practices they used to have. Many wrestlers also took their own will to improve and went to Beat the Streets wrestling program on the days they didn’t have practice.
To close out the season, Yokub won every match he had this year along with the Brooklyn title last week, with a chance to turn that into the city title on Saturday. The team is an important part of John Dewey sports that doesn’t get enough attention. It requires a level of dedication and teaches you that the only way to be good at something is to suck at it first. Maybe Dewey wrestling fell with Coach Conrade, but I believe that the love out there for the sport will prevail its way back into Dewey wrestling.
