Early in November, Westside Wired brought you an early season preview for winter sports. Now, with the season beginning, we will be bringing you more in-depth looks at different sports and their levels. 

Key wrestlers:

“At the varsity level everybody is at the top,” head wrestling coach Michael Jernigan said. “Some of our guys that we really lean on are seniors Dylan Sorrell, senior Ismail Hamze [and] senior Brady Novak. We’ve got some really talented guys that are juniors. We’ve got a couple freshman that have broke our varsity line-up this year. So we’ve got a lot of tough guys that would be considered at the top. Joe Wiles right now is undefeated, was a tournament champ and went 2-0 the other night at our duals. But we really rely on the seniors to be our leaders and be our top guys, and it kind of trickles down from there.”

Big competitions:

“Creighton Prep is going to be our biggest one going into the district tournament,” Jernigan said. “They were able to get a bunch of teams to come in from all over the country which is going to be outstanding. This week at Bellevue East we get five duals against all Class A top competition. Then that kind of leads us right into districts and state, so those would be the top four I’d have to say.”

Keys to the season:

“Keys to the season [are] staying injury free, trying to stay healthy,” Jernigan said. “Once we get past Christmas making weights is a little bit easier because we get some pound allowances, so that kind of works itself out to where the kids can start to eat bigger and better meals instead of just the smaller meals we have to use right now to cut them down. If everyone stays healthy and makes weight we’re going to be pretty darn good.”

Season Expectation:

“I expect us to be good,” Jernigan said. “I think once we get everybody down to weight, and we get the football guys back into our line-up, we’re going to be a tough team. We’re still young dominated. Our senior leadership is important, but I think four or five guys maybe out of the 14 are seniors, so I expect us to be good. I think it would be terrible of a coach not to expect good things going into a year, but I expect that when we get everybody into the situations and get them down to weight and get everybody healthy, we’re going to be a tough team to compete with.”