When the call came for Cisco Zepeda’s three children to wrestle July 23 at Weekend Wars, they were ready.
“When you get a family in here like that, you can do anything,” said Mario Chagolla Sr., Weekend Wars director. “They’ve been coming to practice, on and off, during the school year with the elementary kids.
“What I do, with all of them, is make sure their first experience is a positive one. So when they have fun, they come back.”
Camp Verde Elementary School second-grader Adrienne Zepeda — the youngest of the three siblings — made it to the 90-pound finals, in fact, before being pinned by a smaller opponent.
“My goal is to try to be the top wrestler,” said Zepeda, who started wrestling in April with New Breed Wrestling Club head coach Travis Black at the Camp Verde High School state tournament. “I’m happy with my weight because I can take them down. I wrestled, like, three girls.”
Her older brothers, Ethan and Joey — both third-place finishers at the Sterrett Wrestling Complex — where Ethan was champion of the 86-pound weight class.
When he isn’t wrestling, Zepeda, a Mighty Mites nose guard and right tackle in High Desert Youth Football, looks to improve both by becoming a faster wrestler and by learning more moves.
“I’m still working on wrestling,” said Joey Zepeda, who lost his fourth match to a quicker opponent before coming back to win his final face-off at 140 pounds. “I can balance it. I can go to the field after they’re out of the weight room.”
Both Ethan and Joey Zepeda know that if they are to make the finals and win their next Weekend War, they will need to not only train harder in practice but learn moves like the mousetrap better, too.
“I like blocking,” added Joey Zepeda, a lineman on the Camp Verde Middle School football team. “I need to stay on top of [wrestlers] and hold them down.”
While they both aspire to be high scorers for local wrestling club New Breed in its popular tournaments, held every other weekend through the end of September at the Sterrett Wrestling Complex, the sport also keeps them in shape, Joey Zepeda added.
“I’m going to try to do better in Weekend Wars and in the classroom,” he said. “The last one, I was mostly dominated, got held on the ground for some time.”
Chagolla, their head coach and director of New Breed Wrestling Club, wants the Zepedas to get full exposure to other sports that can help them become better wrestlers.
“I always taught these guys to like sports, in general,” Cisco Zepeda said. “They really like doing [wrestling], so the more they like doing it, the more it helps them.”
But Chagolla made sure that the Zepedas and other wrestlers don’t fall into the habit other grappling sports teach — attempting to pin an opponent from the back first.
“That’s the worst thing you can do in wrestling,” he said. “I can’t break them of that habit. They’ll stick you back on your hands.”
So Chagolla sat down with the three siblings and reminded them how to approach.
“They’ve all been doing boxing,” Chagolla said. “I sat them down, said, ‘You want to do the full circle, you know?’
“How to grapple is the No. 1 thing you need to learn.”
With the start of a new school year comes help from Camp Verde Middle School head wrestling coach Jeremy Uhler and Camp Verde High School assistant coach Larry Allred.
“I just feel good that coach Allred’s back,” Chagolla said. “We have a lot of great guys who are going to do a lot of very good things this year.”
For more photos, please see the Wednesday, Aug. 10, issues of the Camp Verde Journal and Cottonwood Journal Extra.
