Jan 18, 2025
Staff photo by Travis Rosenau New Ulm Area’s Jamisen Frederickson (top) and Lane Ruch wrestle during a practice at New Ulm High School earlier this week.
NEW ULM — The New Ulm Area wrestling team has been a quiet success in the 2024-25 season long enough.
Now the Eagles are ready to finally come home and display their talents to their home crowd at New Ulm High School.
The Eagles wrestling team is ready to host varsity action for the first time all season this coming Thursday in a triangular against Blue Earth Area and Tri-City United. The Eagles, ranked eighth in Class AA, haven’t been able to demonstrate why they’ve earned that ranking to a home crowd yet, making Thursday’s triangular long overdue.
“It’s always easier for the parents and family members to make it to a home event than on the road of course, but ultimately we’re trying to get some community support there, too, because not very many of them have watched the Eagles wrestle this year,” Briggs said.
Thursday’s triangular will be Mental Health Night, while the Rolling Thunder Wrestling youth team will also take the mat. The pep band will also be playing at the tri, which begins at 5 p.m. Thursday at New Ulm High School.
The Eagles haven’t been an overnight success this season. Building off of last year’s strong season that saw the team finish as Big South Conference runners-up and send four wrestlers to the state individual tournament, the Eagles haven’t taken a step back despite graduating key seniors like Logan Lee, Winsten Nienhaus and Evan Thompson.
“We have a veteran team, this has been a long time coming,” Briggs said. “I can fill an entire varsity lineup with 10th-graders through 12th-graders, so that helps with the maturity and the experience that all these kids have had while they take the mat for the varsity team. Even though we’re still relatively young and we’re still getting better, we’ve been getting results that we want for the most part.”
Some of those results Briggs and the Eagles have wanted to see include this year’s Big South Conference Tournament, which took place on Jan. 11 in Jackson and saw the Eagles finish second overall to Marshall out of 14 teams. The Eagles had six boys finish top three in their weight classes in Regan Johnson (107), Kane Johnson (127), Elijah Rieser (139), Braxton Kiecker (145), Wyatt Pollard (172) and Jamisen Frederickson (215), and two girls finish top three in Anna Pollard (112) and Ellie Dake (170). Regan Johnson, Wyatt Pollard, Anna Pollard and Ellie Dake each finished their time in the tournament as individual champions in their respective weight classes.
The Eagles, now 13-1 on the season, also took second this season at the Glencoe Invitational, third at the Redwood River Riot and first at the Foley Invitational.
After a brief break in the action following Thursday’s home tri, New Ulm Area returns home on Jan. 28 for a 5 p.m. quadrangular. The Eagles will need their home crowd to show up as one of the team’s in that quad will be the first-place finishers from the Big South tourney in the Marshall Tigers. Sibley East and St. James Area will also be at that quad.
The quad is also Senior Night, where the Eagles will celebrate their three seniors Wyatt Pollard, Frederickson and Henry Waloch.
Whether New Ulm sports fans have seen a wrestling match in person or not, Briggs and the Eagles are happy to open the door to new fans and hope to see a packed gym in the Eagles’ only two home events this season.
“I think [people should] come support the wrestling team, it’s a state-caliber team and we’ll try to dominate some matches and take another step forward towards our section title,” Briggs said.
As the Eagles continue to build on a strong varsity season, the future is also bright as their ninth-grade league wrestling team qualified for this year’s NGL state tournament, which takes place Saturday, Jan. 18 at Mora Elementary.
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