Hittin’ the SATs before the mats

By Claire Rolinger

Every week, the Cedar Falls’ wrestlers devote 45 minutes to “tapping out” of their athletics and tapping into their studies.

The group of athletes gather in the Tiger’s Den to focus in on their schoolwork every Tuesday before practice.

The idea was created by senior Bryce Pilcher. Pilcher suggested the idea of study tables last year, but it was not put into effect until this past season.

Pilcher explained the reasoning behind his idea.

“I noticed that myself and a lot of the other wrestlers have had trouble keeping our grades up during the season with the workout schedule and all that, and in wrestling grades are a big deal because the semester ends in the middle of the season, so if people have bad grades it affects whether or not they’ll be able to wrestle for the second half of the season.”

Ethan Wiechman, the head wrestling coach, also said that a lot of what they’re doing is because of the team’s GPAs.

“One of the things that we’re trying to work on is that we’ve consistently been at the bottom for Cedar Falls as far as GPA goes. That was something that we felt like was a goal that we could try to improve, so putting study tables in the schedule went along with what our team and coaches wanted to accomplish.”

Just the team achieves goals on the mats, Weichmann has confidence the same can be said in the classrooms.

“I’m just super proud of these guys. When they come up here, they get work done, and they use their time wisely, and just the fact that one of our seniors really made the push for it makes it even better.”

“It was just something that I thought of to help the team, and I’m really glad that the coaches and Wiechman saw the value in it,” Pilcher said.

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