Wrestling with final preparations
Niskayuna senior wins sectionals after skipping ’18 tourneys
Alyssa Duffany, center, Ed Burt, right, Michael Duffany, bottom, and Nate Brown work together Thursday to tape down a mat during setup for the New York state wrestling championships being contested Friday and Saturday at Times Union Center.
Niskayuna’s Willie Thacker rekindled his love of wrestling after seven months off. He’s even bound for this weekend’s state tournament for the first time as a senior.
None of this comeback has come easily. Certainly not the physical part. A bustedup nose at the end of his Feb. 9 sectional championship showed as much. And the sport produced even deeper cuts inside his head the past few years.
“Even early this season, I felt myself going down the same mental paths as the last couple of years,” said Thacker, a 138-pounder. “Just a lot of anxiety. I was in a bad mental place. I’d get nervous about a match. Then I’d get nervous about the fact that I was actu-
ally nervous. Then I’d think, ‘Why am I nervous? I have all of these other things going on that I could go do instead.’”
Thacker’s mother is a lawyer who works with refugees and immigrants. His father is a vice president at Union College, a job opportunity he accepted in the summer of 2016 which brought the family of five from Boston.
Thacker doesn’t come from wrestling stock. His older brother tried it for a few years but Willie wound up liking it more. He also loves to rock climb and kayak.
And he took off for Leadville, Colo., from late January to late May last year — bypassing the second half of wrestling season — to attend a semester of school that featured stringent academics and a lot of time in the rugged outdoors.
After that journey, he spent two months in Costa Rica.
Wrestling was so far on the back burner, it didn’t even seem warm.
“I was still really physically active,” Thacker said. “But I bounced back and forth a little (on returning).”
Thacker finished fourth at sectionals as a sophomore at Niskayuna after moving from Boston.
“And I was very happy with that,” he said, “because the wrestling is a lot better here.”
Still, he wanted more. Maybe too much. Thacker credits a sports psychologist for helping him tweak his internal combustion at the start of the new year.
He was a No. 3 seed in the Class A Tournament and the No. 4 seed at the sectional championships in Glens Falls two weekends ago. He won both events, even avenging some regular-season losses.
“Willie does best when he’s focused on having fun trying to conquer a challenge,” Niskayuna coach Sean Neely said. “Not when he’s focused on winning or losing.”
Thacker ousted La Salle’s Nick Pino in the longest, most intense of the 30 sectional finals. The Division II final in their weight class ended quickly, so all eyes were on Thackerpino. It went to sudden-finish ride-out time. Even the most neutral observers at Cool Insuring Arena were on edge.
“There were so many blood stoppage timeouts,” Thacker said. “It wasn’t as physically draining as you’d think. Really, I just wrestled relaxed after I gave up the first two takedowns. I had been expecting a different style (from Pino).”
It capped off a topsy-turvy three months.
Thacker was at Mat Mania in Glens Falls on Dec. 8 when he checked his phone. He had been accepted to Middlebury College, where he’ll join his sister.
But by the end of the month, he was back in the same old ruts. Neely said Thacker struggled more with dual matches, which present a different type of pressure than weekend tournaments.
Thacker changed his tune: “I can’t control everything. But I can control whether I scrap out there.”
He will have to scrap to get into Saturday’s medal round. Thacker is such an underdog in his weight class, he’s unseeded with a 32-7 record despite beating Saratoga Springs’ Eric Griskowitz in the postseason twice. Griskowitz, 38-5, is a No. 4 seed.
Thacker will first face No. 2 seed Willie Mcdougald of Niagara Falls — the defending state champ in the weight class.
“We talked briefly about strategy, but I don’t think Willie wanted to get too overly focused on one match,” Neely said. “The key for him will be to wrestle to the best of his ability all weekend long. If he can do that, he has a good shot at placing in the state.”
Thacker still has other interests, like planning to enroll late to Middlebury — February of 2020 — so that he can hike on the Continental Divide from Canada (starting at Glacier National Park) to Mexico.
This wrestling season is something he’ll pack with him, wherever he goes.
“That incredible feeling of winning sectionals has faded a little, and that’s OK,” Thacker said. “Back to practice and everything. But I am left with this satisfaction, because of doing what I wanted to do. It’s nice to know I stuck with it when maybe I didn’t think I was going to.”