It was Feb. 18, 2023, and Beck Holtzman ’25 was facing off against Gonzaga wrestler Andrew Irisari in the District of Columbia State Athletic Association (DCSAA) season championships. While the match started slow, Holtzman was eventually able to best Irisari and went on to win the DCSAA Individual Championship for his weight class. Earlier that month, GDS also won both Mid-Atlantic Athletic Conference Championships (MAC)—dual and individual—cementing the first full MAC banner in the history of GDS wrestling.
But those days are over—at least for now. This year, there is no longer a GDS wrestling team. In September, the athletic department announced that winter and spring sports would need a certain number of players to field a team. For wrestling, that number was six. Less than half of that signed up this season.
According to athletic director Mike Brooks, the “historically strong [wrestling] program” no longer had enough players to practice or compete with other teams.
Last year, the number of participating wrestlers fluctuated between one to five players each meet, with usually only two wrestlers competing. With these low numbers, wrestlers and coaches said they lost the type of team atmosphere that comes with having many players on a team. However, according to sophomore Stuart Mitchell, the small roster had some advantages: The limited number of wrestlers made it possible for the coaches to focus more on each individual, allowing them to improve their skills.
Only two wrestlers, Holtzman and Mitchell, competed in last year’s MAC championships. In the individuals, Holtzman won his fourth MAC championship—the most in GDS history—and Mitchell came in third place. However, the wrestlers struggled more in the duals; Holtzman reported feeling sick before the match, and the team had to forfeit 23 matches due to their small roster. GDS finished fourth overall.
“We weren’t able to win because we had such low numbers, but I really grew as a wrestler,” Mitchell said, looking back on the meet and the difficult season.
To Holtzman, the news that GDS no longer has a wrestling team was saddening. But he also said the dissolution of the team made sense, given that head coach Grayson Shepperd ’11 left alongside Holtzman when he graduated last year. Shepperd had been coaching Holtzman since he was in 7th grade. “Grayson [Shepperd] was sort of the backbone of the program, and with his stepping away, it’s difficult to run a team,” Holtzman said.
Last year, Shepperd said Holtzman was one of three GDS wrestlers he was aware of to reach 100 wins, the other two being Julia Ernst ’14 and actor Ethan Slater ’10. Holtzman is now a freshman wrestler at Wesleyan University.
To try to rebuild the team, Brooks said he will “try to get as many high school students as possible, [while] also getting some outreach and putting it front of mind in the middle school and lower school” by “getting it into the [PE] curriculum.”
Brooks stressed the wrestling team’s significance to the GDS community and encouraged students to sign up in the future: “We really want to get this great program back up and running at GDS as soon as possible.”
CORRECTION (Dec. 15 at 9:37 a.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Holtzman wrestled Irisari in the MAC tournament.