Wesley Chapel grappler takes fifth at State Wrestling Championships

Wesley Chapel High (WCH) junior wrestler Emmanuel Torres has been searching for an athletic outlet since he was a child.

He studied boxing growing up in New York. When he moved to Florida as a teenager, he took up karate. From karate he found Muay Thai kickboxing and later Jiu Jitsu.

He even tried out for the football team at WCH, but something was still missing.

He found what he was looking for on the wrestling mat. Now he’s looking for more.

Torres capped his best high school season yet by taking fifth at the Florida High School Athletic Association’s Class 2A Wrestling State Championships over the weekend. He advanced to the semifinals of the 138-pound division, before losing 8-1 to Brandon’s Frankie Bruno, who went on to win the championship. Torres fought his way through the consolation bracket to grab fifth with a 3-1 victory over Hadley Vadyak of Fort Myers.

Torres finished his season with a 56-11 record, emerging as one Class 2A, District 7’s top grapplers, no easy feat considering the district includes Lake Gibson and nationally-renowned Brandon, the state champions.

Torres was second at the 2A-7 district competition, advancing to regionals, where he finished fourth to qualify for the state tournament for the second straight year. Torres qualified for state as a sophomore last year, winning two matches there but not placing.

It was a long a challenging road to the mat for the Wildcat.

“I would try all these different sports and I would tell my mom that I just don’t feel it,” Torres says. “After wrestling my freshman year, I knew this is the sport. It’s challenging, it’s competitive and I’m really into it. I didn’t want to stop competing, getting better.”

Torres would wrestle on the grass practice fields after football with friend Sage Nugent. Nugent was a WCH varsity wrestler and the first to encourage Torres to try out for the wrestling team.

“When he (Torres) first came, he was quiet, nothing too adroit or deft or anything that really screamed, ‘special’,” Wesley Chapel wrestling coach Jeff Beson said. “In fact, he was beat up, day after day, by the veterans.”

Torres was still stuck in Jiu Jitsu mode, trying arm-bars and chokes when he first started in the wrestling room.

“I’d never even seen these circles (on the mat) before,” Torres said. “I would pull a Jiu Jitsu move and Sage would tell me I couldn’t do that in wrestling.”

Torres was called up to the varsity team his freshman year for districts. He remembers his first competition at Hernando High in Brooksville vividly.

“My first round match, I went against a kid from Anclote, pinned him but in the second round, I got (Pasco eventual state placer) Skyler White and he destroyed me,” Torres admits. “As a freshman, that was my first time going against a legit kid who knew what he was doing – it showed me how much work I needed to put into the sport to get (where he was).”

Despite the loss, Torres was not intimidated.

“He (Torres) stuck with it,’’ Beson said. “That was his thing, he’s a worker and got the itch to want more and has been like that ever since.”

In the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, Torres worked with the Wesley Chapel Wildcats Wrestling Club and had a breakthrough at The Father Divine National Qualifier tournament, where he realized that some of his martial arts skills translated to the wrestling mat.

“Jiu Jitsu really helps with your hips and transitions and riding legs,” Torres said. “It was something I found I was good at.”

Torres cut his teeth on the toughest of competition right there in the wrestling room, just behind the Wesley Chapel gymnasium. The Wildcat grappler benefitted by practicing with teammates like John Galvin, who graduated in 2014 after finished third at state in back-to-back seasons, and Tony Ruggiero, who won the state championship his senior year in 2013.

“They showed me that level where I have to be at that if I’m tired or I make a mistake, I have to keep trying, work harder,” he said. “They were always giving me little tips and things.”

Torres has aims at wrestling in college. With two state tournaments to his credit and his senior year in front of him, his prospects are pretty good. Torres isn’t dissuaded from how hard wrestling in college can be.

“People talk about how tough it is to wrestle in college but I like the hard work, it just makes me better,” Torres said.

But as much as Torres has grown to love wrestling, there’s still a few things about the sport he can’t get used to.

“Food discipline, always cutting weight. I weighed 160 over the summer and had to cut down to 138,” Torres said. “Today, I saw some cookies on top of the fridge and I thought, ‘Oh, man. I wanna eat that whole bag’.”