Prep Wrestling: Mixing IngredientS

It's not quite the mixture Greg Langley is necessarily comfortable with or even likes, but the 26th year head wrestling coach at Harrisburg is going to experiment with a little bit of experience and a little bit of youth.

Not out of necessity, but more out of design, Langley has a large class of freshmen that will likely see mat time this winter.

On the flip side, those freshmen aren't exactly green to the sport as a number of them have been competing for year with the Illinois Kids Wrestling Federation.

Some 25 kids make up Langley's roster this year, of those returning, seniors Cody Rightnowar, Blane Satterfield and Lucian Hicks, along with juniors Chase McDaniel, Ryan Ragsdale and Gunner Trammel will bestow their leadership to the youngsters.

Filling out the roster are sophomores, Chandler Bowling, Nathan Horn, Alex Johnson, Seth Martineau, Baylee Pate, Chase Pritchett, Jared Schmook and Brandon Shelton. Freshmen include, Kody and Kyle Cavender, Skye Henson, Jimmy and Landon Hicks, Caleb Smith, James Stone and Franko Teston.

Langley said you could call his team "relatively young," but even he's not sure what kind of label to put on his bunch.

"We have three seniors on this group, but we also have some freshmen coming in that have wrestled in the past with IKWF, so they'll definitely have a few freshmen in the starting lineup and then some juniors and sophomores in there.

"You could call us relatively young, but at least we have some prior background in wrestling coming into the year."

Langley calls the IKWF program a major building block in the maturation process for wrestlers.

One of Langley's challenges however are to start separating his wrestlers into weight classes, which is normally no easy task.

"It makes it real tough when you have two really solid kids and they're both at the same weight," Langley said. "The biggest challenge is to not have them all at the same weight with 14 weight classes you try to separate them out. I'm still not positive where everyone is going to go, I'll have a better understanding after we do some body fat testing."

"One of the other issues we face is, you always worry about that many young guys knowing what to expect and how they're going to fare wrestling against some older kids, but I think early on our practices have gone really well. The kids have been very attentive to what we are trying to get across to them as a coaching staff and they have listened and followed along."

Michael Dann covers prep and college sports for the Harrisburg Daily Register. Follow him on Twitter: @spydieshooter.