Wrestling helps to transform Keegan Gibbons from someone who ‘hated running’ in younger, heavier days to someone who loves it as he tries to extend his run all the way to the state meet with strong showing Saturday at semi-state

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

A well-timed show of respect from a peer can go a long way for a high school athlete, especially when it arrives so suddenly.
Chesterton senior wrestler Keegan Gibbons was awaiting his semifinal match vs. Michigan City’s Dezmon Howard, to whom he had lost in January, when Landen Buck, a wrestler from New Prairie, sent respectful words his way.
“He said, ‘You’re a third-period demon. I hate wrestling you in the third period,’” Gibbons said. “So I knew I had to tire him out, get some fakes going, so he was pretty tired the third period and I just shot the shot and I got him in overtime again.”
Howard took a 27-2 match into it and a 27-3 mark out of it. Gibbons brings a 30-14 record into Saturday, so technically it was an upset, but Gibbons didn’t look at it that way.
“He beat me in the dual (meet) this year. Last year we saw each other three times and I was 2-1 against him,” Gibbons said of Howard. “And at the dual he won 4-1. It was a pretty close match, but I didn’t wrestle as well as I could have, so that brought us to being 2-2 against each other. Going into it, I knew I had to be on the attack more.”
After hearing from the New Prairie wrestler, someone outside the Chesterton wrestling room, the same message he hears every day inside the room, the one about the third period being Trojan Time, made Gibbons a man with a plan.
“He said I was good in the third period and that gave me the confidence to think, ‘This is my thing; I just have to wear him out and this is what I should focus on and really trust my coaches and the conditioning that they’ve given me,’” Gibbons said, and traced the source of the conditioning. “Over the summer we’re always conditioning really hard. It’s been that for a while, since the program started and they’ve carried it on pretty well. We just run miles and then wrestle live after.”
As a result, he said, he is in the best shape of his life.
“When I first started wrestling in eighth grade I was almost 300 pounds,” he said. “It helped me cut weight a lot. I hated running, but now I love running because of wrestling.”
To reach the semifinal match vs. Howard Gibbons first had to defeat Lowell’s Anthony Ruiz, whose style he learned during the match, was similar to that of his daily wrestling partner, heavyweight Connor Olson.
“He was really scrambley, kind of weird,” Gibbons said of Ruiz. “I’m familiar with that because of Connor. He’s a scramble dude. He gets weird. Like Coach Bowen always screams in the corner, ‘Get weird.’ So that kind of helped a lot, cuz that dude just got weird the whole time. He got into weird scrambles and I was able to finish those scrambles because of Connor.”
By weird, Gibbons didn’t mean that Lopez and Olson have weird personalities, just unusual wrestling styles.
Gibbons explained what he meant by “scrambly” or “weird”: “Like, not traditional moves. It’s just like moves that aren’t really normal, not like an average move you would drill. Rolling, seeing where you can get, grabbing an ankle and raising it up, anything to get in a weird position your opponent doesn’t know. Connor only does weird stuff, so that’s his whole thing.”
Gibbons pinned Lopez in 1:46 and then set about trying to improve his seeding for semi-state by defeating Howard, which took considerably longer. Gibbons defeated Howard 7-4 in sudden victory. That set up a championship match against Ceasar Salas, the state’s No. 1-ranked 215-pound wrestler. Salas won it in 1:34 on a technical fall, 17-2.
Emerging from a 16-wrestler field at the semi-state to advance to state requires a wrestler to win his first two matches.
Rochester’s Mason Hisey (25-14) presents Gibbons’ first challenge Saturday, followed by the winner of a match between Munster’s Andrew Kooi (34-6) and Benton Central’s Logan Hoaks (22-9).
“I feel like there’s a good chance,” Gibbons said of him advancing to state.
A look at the first and potential quarterfinal matches for the other five Chesterton wrestlers competing Saturday at the East Chicago semi-state:
Max Quiroz, 126 pounds (41-2): Sectional and regional champion is undefeated since moving from 132 pounds to 126 after the Al Smith Invitational. Quiroz faces Merrillville’s Marion McClain (22-16) in the first round and then faces the winner of Bremen’s Colin Motes (23-6) vs. West Central’s Cameron Nuest (34-6).
Caden Mahaffey, 150 pounds (31-11) vs. Highland’s Landen Garrison (31-9); winner faces winner of Lafayette Jefferson’s RJ McCoy (34-2) vs. South Bend Riley’s Maxum Kotinek (22-13).
Greyson Strickland, 165 pounds (31-9) vs. Rensselaer Central’s Ryder Woodke (28-9); winner faces winner of Hobart’s Hayden Mancilla (32-1) vs. Warsaw’s Enrique Silva (23-12).
Patrick Mochen (28-11) vs. Rochester’s Kale Shotts (37-5); winner faces winner of Rensselaer Central’s Carter Ogborn (35-5) vs. Griffith’s Aiden Fleming (31-12).
Lucas Anderson (29-8) vs. West Lafayette Harrison’s Tramel Quadhamer (39-3); winner faces winner of Penn’s Alessio Retzloff (33-5) vs. Munster’s Wesaal Wardak (26-8).