After winning their fourth straight championship this past season, the SVHS wrestling team is continuing to hone their skills as they host All-American Shakur Rasheed from the National Champion Penn State Nittany Lions.
“Shakur Rasheed was the #2 ranked guy in the country right up until the point where he hurt his knee and didn’t wrestle until the national qualifier,” said SVHS head coach Eddie Clark. “He’s had the knee repaired and he’s a favorite to make a run at a national championship at 184 pounds next year.”
The Star Valley camp is expected to draw approximately 50 wrestlers from the valley and another 20 from Cokeville. The camp takes place this Friday and Saturday at Star Valley Middle School and will run sessions from 9-11:30 a.m. and 1-3:30 p.m. on both days.
Despite the high level concepts that will be discussed, Clark emphasized that the more things change the more things come back to the basics.
“We’re gonna work on very fundamental things,” he said. “It’s about not winning with flashy things even at the higher level of wrestling. So we’ll work on hand-fighting and positioning and setting up our shots. If you listen to Cael Sanderson, that’s what takes place at their practice all the time.”
Sanderson, a Utah native, went undefeated in college and won an Olympic gold medal in Athens in 2004. In 2010 he became the head coach of Penn State and has guided the program to eight national championships. Rasheed will be assisted by SVHS standout Austin Hoopes who has worked his way into the Lion’s wrestling room after returning from a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Clark pointed out that this is the latest opportunity that area wrestlers have had to learn from the best in their own backyard.
“Anything we can pick up that will help us, we’re all for that,” he said. “We went down to a clinic from Jason Nolf who was a three-time champ for Penn State,” he sad. “He came in and did a one day clinic at [Utah Valley University] at a [Regional Training Center]. You have to have placed so high in the state to qualify to get in the room to go to the camp.”
Other wrestlers from Oregon State, Wyoming and of course Penn State have come to Star Valley in recent years.
“It s just a neat opportunity for our kids to rub shoulders with the best program in the country,” Clark reiterated. “I don’t know that people understand the level of guys we’ve had coming in to the valley for about the past ten years. Guys that are some of the best clinicians in the country right there in Star Valley. Usually when you go to these camps you have 400 kids and you never get to interact with the clinician. So we bring them here and let our kids get a one-on-one experience with those individuals. Not just the technique but to see the kind of people they are too.”
The camp serves as the first of a two-part summer wrestling push with athletes then heading to Salina, Utah for competition next week.
“It gives us a chance to work on the things from camp,” Clark concluded. “It’s a nice back-to-back where we work on skills and take them down and compete with them.”
