Toughest in the Country
By Mason Kelley
Two periods. Zero points. Back in 2001, Darrell Vasquez and Jacob Palomino squared off in one of the more memorable moments in the history of the CIF State Wrestling Championships.
Darrell Vasquez gets the win over Jason Williams. Clovis High wrestler Saturday at the Spanos Center in Stockton for his fourth straight state wrestling championship Palomino, who wrestled at San Jose-Independence, entered the match aiming for his fourth straight state title, while Vasquez came in looking for No. 3.
Each wrestler could have tried to go up a weight and avoid each other. They could have become the first and second wrestlers to win four straight titles.
But, as tends to be the case with wrestlers, they both wanted to earn it the hard way.
“He didn’t want me to do it,” said Vasquez, during his return to Bakersfield on his way to a title at 133 pounds for Cal Poly at the Pac-10 Wrestling Championships at the Icardo Center. “He wanted to be the only one to do it. To put it simply, we knew it was only going to be us who could stop each other. I knew that. I knew I was the only one who was going to be able to stop that kid.”
Through two periods, the wrestlers held each other scoreless. Vasquez picked up four points and the win in the third period of what would be toughest match of his high school career.
The next year he claimed his fourth. He became the first person in the history of the CIF State Wrestling Championships to win four in a row.
“A couple may do it again, but that’s one thing they’ll never take away,” Vasquez said. “I was the first one. I may not be the only one in time, but I was the first one.”
For Vasquez and wrestlers like him, the season isn’t compete until their hands are raised on the elevated stage with the spotlight on them.
Since 1973, the best wrestlers in California have come together to determine who is the best.
Many consider this two-day event the toughest high school wrestling championship in the country.
“It’s by far the toughest in the nation to win,” said Elijah Nacita, who won a title at 135 pounds last year for Bakersfield High. “I know there are some tough kids out there from other states that are maybe better sometimes than kids from California that are state champs. But to go through the process of winning a California state championship is by far the hardest.”
It all starts with the league tournament. Then there’s the section championships and then the masters championships. Get through all that, and then there’s the state championships.
“You get toward the end of the year and you’ve worked hard the whole year for this one tournament,” said Nathan Morgan, who won three titles at BHS before moving on to Oklahoma State. “It’s all coming down to that one weekend.”
For many, it is the first trip to state that is the hardest. There will be 10 mats going at once today, a spectacle that Stephen Neal admits to getting caught up in during his first trip to state as a junior at San Diego High.
“I remember the first year I competed, I came up there from San Diego and I hadn’t really wrestled anyone outside of San Diego,” said Neal, who went on to become a four-time All-American and two-time undefeated NCAA Division I National Champion wrestling for Cal State Bakersfield. Now, he’s the starting right guard for the New England Patriots. “I think they had eight mats going. It was just the biggest thing I had ever seen.
“I was in awe, but I went out there and had a good time. I enjoy performing and competing and I was excited about being there.”
While at San Diego High, Neal’s best finish at state was fourth at 191 pounds. Neal said the difference between his college and high school careers was the coaching he got from T.J. Kerr and Darryl Pope at CSUB.
It just serves as another indication of how difficult it is to win a state title. Sometimes, it’s a difference in physical strength. Sometimes, one wrestler holds a mental edge and, sometimes, it comes down to coaching.
Nacita gives a lot of the credit for his state championship to the Drillers’ coaching staff. It makes sense then that, when someone thinks about state titles in Bakersfield, they think about BHS.
“It’s the peak. It’s everything you could want in high school,” Nactia said. “When you win something like that you’ve fulfilled your goal. You’ve done what you wanted to do. Winning it is just a good feeling, leaving everything on the mat and knowing you did everything you could to win it.”
Neal still remembers wrestling Casey Strand in the semifinals. Strand, who went on to wrestle at Arizona State, “was doing stuff I had never even seen before,” Neal said. “I think I scored seven points and he gave me seven escapes. It was 16-7 and I just got beat. I didn’t know why.”
Last season, Centennial’s Bryce Horton, Shafter’s Lucas Espericueta and BHS’s Tony Webber spent most of the season ranked in the top three in the state at 145 pounds.
But, when state rolled around, it was Healdsburg’s Andrew Rogers who took the title.
“It’s so nerve-wracking,” said Espericueta, who wrestled for Shafter and is now a freshman at Stanford. “That’s all you think about: the next match. You just try to focus on the next match, but it’s hard to, because you want to look ahead.”
At the end of each state tournament, every wrestler who puts on a singlet wants to be able to bask in the glow of the flourescent spotlights. They want to point toward the rafters and soak up their accomplishment while an arena full of fans chant their names. But out of the more than 500 wrestlers who descend on Rabobank Arena today, only 14 will call themselves state champions.
“For some guys, it’s hard to keep your head on straight,” said Jake Varner, a two-time state champion who went 47-0 as a senior at BHS. “A lot of guys break who are supposed to place. It’s tough …”
Oliver Salud wrote "Toughest in the Country" on March 1, 2007. This post has 
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