Quad County

By Brian Jerzak

Before his junior year, Quad County's Bryce Schmidt had only played football and baseball. He had never even set foot on a wrestling mat. By the end of his senior year, he was walking out on the floor of the Xcel Energy Center in the state tournament. His unlikely journey might never have happened if Schmidt wasn't conned into trying wrestling.

"My friends who encouraged me to wrestle played football and they were going to take this picture," Schmidt said. "They told me to come be in the picture. I didn't know what it was about, so I just did it. They called it the Wrestling Pic. It was all the wrestlers who played football and me. They said, ‘you are in that picture, so you have to join wrestling now'; I got conned into that."

Schmidt went along with his friends but had almost zero exposure to wrestling before the winter of his junior year.