This past Saturday, the boys wrestling Gateway Athletic Conference Tournament was held at St. Charles West High School. While Francis Howell High was the team to take home the GAC title, a few star players competed well and secured the Howell Central team a fifth place honor.

Freshman Aidan Hernandez came in second place. Hernandez has been wrestling for 10 years, and feels that while there is still improvement to be made, he is proud of how far his teammates have come since he joined the team at the beginning of the season. 

“We have a lot of work to do, but we’ve come a long way,” Hernandez said.

Junior Andrew Mirth feels that both he personally and the team as a whole have a lot to work on, but still put in as much effort as they could.

“I felt like I did my best. I mean, maybe I could have prepared more or conditioned more, but I put my best effort out there, so that’s what matters,” Mirth said.

According to Junior Kaden Hart, there were a few setbacks that put the team at a disadvantage. However, they were able to pull through and perform as well as possible.

“We were missing a few guys for weight issues and we didn’t have a full lineup… We had some guys step up and they did better than I thought [they would],” Hart said.

Hart adds that being able to see his teammates do well was very rewarding.

“It was a great experience. We got a lot of freshmen on the team and they’re all stepping it up,” Hart said.

While the boys wrestling team wasn’t completely satisfied with the results of GACs, Hernandez explains that he and his teammates are using the somewhat disappointing experience to motivate them to do better in the future. 

“As a whole we did pretty good, we could’ve done better in some places… This shows us that we have farther to go and can work harder to get better,” Hernandez added.