An Okotoks wrestler who rarely loses is hungry to get back to international competition after being beaten twice at the World championships.
Seventeen-year-old Reid Watkins finished 19th in the 69kg weight division at the Fila Cadet World Wrestling Championships after losing both of his matches in Szombathely, Hungary on Aug. 22.
The Holy Trinity Academy Grade 12 student hates losing, but he knows he can learn from his defeats. The world championship was the first time Watkins lost to an opponent of his own age in more than a year.
“You don’t go there to wrestle people who are no good, you go there to wrestle people who are good,” Watkins said. “I ended up not doing as well as I wanted – I don’t like to lose. Now I look back on it I’m thinking: ‘That is one of the best things that could have happened.’
“Now I know what it takes to win at the world championships. I have to train harder.”
He should work on getting a better draw. His two matches came against wrestlers from two of the strongest countries in the world in the sport, Russia and the United States.
“Even people who don’t know anything about wrestling know Russia
and the U.S. are the top
dogs,” he said.
His first match was against the eventual world champion at 69kg, Magomedgadzhi Imanshapiev from Russia.
“I kind of put too much hype on him – I didn’t go in there confident,” Watkins said. “I go back and look at the film and I don’t think I am that far from him skill wise.”
He was beaten in the best-of-three two-minute rounds 6-0, 4-0 (a round is stopped if a wrestler gets ahead by six points).
“The second round we went the full two minutes obviously,” Watkins said. “The first round, I went about a minute 40 so I held my own. I wrestled a lot better in the second round. I just wasn’t ready to wrestle in the first round… He was really quick. It was hard to keep up with him.”
Watkins nearly scored a point on the Russian in the second round.
“In the second round I didn’t worry about who he was or how he wrestled – I was concerned about how I wrestled,” Watkins said. “There was one time when I got behind him and started turning him on his back. One ref called it one point, another two points and the head ref, no points.
“If I would have gotten just one point it would have moved me up from 19th to about ninth.”
He then came up against American wrestler Oliver Pierce.
“He was your typical American wrestler, they have this funky style,” he said. “It’s odd. The Americans aren’t allowed to lock their hands (when wrestling in the U.S.), so you end up getting in some odd positions. But I have wrestled a lot of Americans, that’s no excuse.”
Watkins lost both rounds to Pierce, 1-0, 3-2.
“I actually thought I was going to come back and beat him, but it just wasn’t my day,” Watkins said. Pierce would finish fifth at the world championships.
Watkins said the opportunity to study wrestlers’ different styles will help him in the future.
He will now focus on playing running back for the Holy Trinity Academy Knights football team.
The high school wrestling season begins in late November. Watkins, who has won gold at the last two high school provincial wrestling championships, will have added motivation this year because the high school provincials are being held in Okotoks at Foothills Composite High School.
