By Gene Richtsmeier
The Saint Agnes Aggies 2021-2022 season has been one of the most memorable seasons, with signs of a thriving program for years to come. To add to the excitement, the team celebrates its 10th year as a team, showing that the in-house youth program the school has developed continues to produce high school wrestlers ready to be a team.
In terms of demographics, Saint Agnes is a Pre-K through 12th-grade school. The high school has around four hundred students and is filled with close groups of families. When we call our team a brotherhood many times it’s very literal with the amount of family members on the team.
Our coaching staff is excited to see so many young athletes enjoying wrestling and carrying that energy into the high school program and see them have success.
Saint Agnes won the Tri Metro Conference this season with a 7-0 conference record.
This Aggies’ record finish was a great step forward for the Saint Agnes program. They did not achieve the conference championship easily, and they challenged top teams in the state along the way. Saint Agnes competed against number one rated AA and AAA teams, knowing that they would learn from the experience, win or lose. This approach led to several upsets against much bigger schools in non-conference play, giving Saint Agnes confidence going into the year-end competition.
With the individual conference tournament approaching, an event that the team hasn’t won before, the school itself was buzzing with the possibility that senior Isaac Schmidt would break the school record of 117 wins. It was exciting to watch our young program get so much support from our students, staff and other winter sports teams wanting to cheer us on!
During the final match for the individual conference champion title, Schmidt had an opportunity to break the school record of most wins by any wrestler. Like a script from a movie with all the pressure and excitement, he met all expectations. Schmidt broke the school record surrounded by his team, coaches, friends, family, and classmates that revealed t-shirts showing off his 118 wins!
By the end of the tournament, we had a number of All-conference wrestlers and honorable mentions leading to the program’s most successful conference tournament in program history.
To see the sport grow in our school hopefully inspires others to take up the call and look to positively impact young students’ lives. This has been a labor of love for much of the coaching staff, and to see this sport and its athletes be front and center in a small metro school like ours, I hope serves as an inspiration to others.