By Mark Carpenter

People’s Defender

Just as West Union High School did a few years ago, the sport of wrestling is underway at Manchester High School. Coached by Nick Neria, the “grapplin” Greyhounds have been practicing daily and preparing to jump right into the 2023-24 season as another winter sports option for Manchester loyalists.

Coach Neria, who is also the Greyhounds’ varsity football coach, was a high school wrestler himself at Dayton Stebbins High School and coached wrestling there before he moved to the Manchester system. fortunate enough in his words to be able to coach his brother at Stebbins.

“I think the idea of wrestling at Manchester evolved from just being able to have something else for the kids to do,” says Coach Neria. “These are different kids out here, kids you don’t see in other sports and that was pretty important to our school board to have something different. Some of the wrestlers are football players, not all of them.”

“We just started putting stuff together last year and I made a presentation to the board where I laid out the benefits of what wrestling could do for our kids and it was approved. We had to work on finding mats and equipment and West Union coach Michael Felts helped us out with a used mat but our kids are working on it just fine.”

“We have grades 7-12 right now,” Neria continued, “junior high wrestlers can only wrestle against junior high and high school against high school and we try to keep things as close to weight as we can. Right now we have all boys though girls can join if they’d like and at the moment we have about 12-15 high school boys participating and about the same for junior high.”

As a program goal Neria explains that he just wants to provide an outlet for kids to have something else to do during the winter, just one more thing we can provide for our kids at Manchester.

“We hope everyone who is wrestling right now will come right back next year and do it again.”

The Greyhounds will jump right into the fire this winter, wrestling a varsity schedule, mainly because there just aren’t schools in this area that have JV wrestling squads.

Because of the physicality of the two sports, wrestling attracts football players and two of the key member of the 2023 Greyhound football team have now jumped into the sport of wrestling.

“I want to wrestle to help me stay in shape after football ended,” said senior Logan Neria. “If I wasn’t doing this, I’d just be staying at home not doing anything. The physicality of wrestling is pretty fun and I just like staying involved, but I’ve never done anything like this.”

Junior Mason Gilliam is also making the transition from the gridiron to the mat.

“Coach Neria has been my football coach since third grade so I figured I’d come and at least give his wrestling a try,” says Gilliam. “I just like being competitive and the physical aspect of wrestling and Coach Neria has been a great mentor to all of us so far with his own wrestling background. This is my third week of practice and I’m pretty sure I could handle a match right now. My goal for this season is to win at the districts and I’ll definitely be back next year.”

The Hounds will open their season on December 9 at Williamsburg as all of their matches this season will be on the road. The rest of the schedule includes: December 16-North College Hill; December 21- Huntington Pool Tournament; December 29- Gallia Middle School (JH); January 6- North College Hill (JH); January 6- West Union; January 13- Greenup County (Ky.); January 17- Williamsburg (HS,JH); January 20- Williamsburg (JH). Sectional tournaments are February 23-24 and districts are March 1-2.

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