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Fallbrook High wrestling hopeful for new season, but needs new wrestling mats

Wrestling season is almost back, and Fallbrook High School’s varsity team is looking forward to it after what coach Cristian Vera called a “very promising” 2018-19 season.

“We finished 5-4 in records and won our first four straight, and we came out with a big win against what you would call our league rival, Valley Center,” Vera said.

And he said the team has several successful returning players.

“We had seven CIF placers at the tournament we hosted last year, and all seven returned this year,” he said. “And we have a young group of sophomores and freshmen that are up and coming and are hungry to keep that success going for our team.”

The team’s first meet of the season will be at Del Norte High School in San Diego Nov. 14.

One of Fallbrook High wrestling’s biggest challenges this season, though, will not be winning meets, but purchasing mats, Vera said.

The average life span of a wrestling mat is about 10 to 12 years.

But because they can be such an expensive purchase – on the order of $12,000 to $15,000, Vera said – Fallbrook High has had to let its wrestling team’s mats run far over that average.

Just how old are they, though?

“The newest mat that we currently have was purchased somewhere between 2000 to 2004,” Vera said.

That makes it the same age as or older than many of the students using it. And the team’s only other mat is even older, having been purchased at some point in the 1990s.

Vera said he doesn’t blame the school district for the old mats – tens of thousands of dollars is a lot of money.

The team has been able to raise a little over $2,000 for one or two new mats, but it still has a long way to go. But one of the biggest ways a wrestling team can raise money for itself is to run a tournament, Vera said, and it’s hard to run a tournament with only two old mats – creating a vicious cycle of sorts.

“The average is six mats for a varsity tournament,” Vera said. The last time the Fallbrook High team ran a tournament, he said, they had to borrow mats from other nearby high schools.

“We had to borrow the other four from neighboring programs and it becomes a logistical nightmare,” he said.

And they were lucky to even get other schools to donate their mats, he said.

“I don’t blame the other schools but when you travel with mats, things can happen,” Vera said. “Owning your own mat and having them available to you in your own school makes things substantially easier.”

Vera said the wrestling team would like members of the Fallbrook community to stop by at the team’s tournament fundraisers to help fund at least one more new mat, or possibly more.

“It would be a dream come true if we could get two,” he said. “Having four mats gives us the ability to run any lower level tournament that we want.”

 

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