Jason Welch is no stranger to success on the wrestling mat. The redshirt junior was one of the top recruits in the nation coming out of Los Lomas High School in northern California, having won the Junior Dan Hodge Trophy, which is annually awarded to the nation’s best high school wrestler.
But it’s a different monster competing at one of the nation’s top academic institutions.
Now, with the Big Ten season in full swing and Big Ten and NCAA Tournaments coming up in the next month, Welch and the Wildcats are at the most grueling point of the season. With matches against top competition in the stacked Big Ten on Friday and Sunday virtually every week, the pressure has started to build on Northwestern’s best wrestler.
For example, on the day of a Friday night match, Welch has class at 9 a.m. This makes for a strenuous couple days before a pair of matches.
“I probably won’t eat much on Thursday or Friday,” he said. “I’m going to have to go to class and workout right afterwards. It can get difficult to balance those two schedules.”
To keep wrestlers from wearing down into the third month of the season, practices are shorter. Still, the team still has sessions on Monday through Thursday that have not lost their intensity.
They start with a 15-20 minute warm-up of running and calisthenics before stretching for five minutes. Each wrestler then does drills with a partner in his weight class for 30 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of sparring during which the two go over technique. Afterwards, they drill again for 10-15 minutes before ending with 30 minutes of live wrestling.
He is ranked No. 2 in the 157 lbs. weight class and is undefeated in 20 matches this season. He led his team to a second-place finish – the team's highest finish ever – in the Midlands Championships, a tournament hosted in Evanston in December with some of the best wresters in the nation. He has already defeated four ranked opponents this season and is on pace to make the third NCAA Tournament appearance of his career.
So far, balancing the load of academics and Division I wrestling doesn’t seem to be a problem for the redshirt junior. But it's also not the first time he's needed to balance a heavy workload.
While in high school, Welch’s wrestling season overlapped with what he described as his favorite sport, soccer. As the top high school wrestler in the country, it would seem natural to simply focus on wrestling and the process of being recruited by some of the best universities in the country, but Welch looked at it as an opportunity to spend part of his life away from the mat. He competed in both sports, wrestling daily at 3:30 p.m. and then going to soccer practice at 7 p.m.
“I didn’t see it as another obligation or responsibility,” he said. “We would be outside and get out of the wrestling room. So I think it was really good for me actually to get a healthy positive distraction from wrestling.”
For Welch, soccer was almost like a break from the high intensity of wrestling. “You can’t really compare it to the physical toughness of wrestling,” he said.
If anything makes his busy schedule worth it, it's that wrestling helped Welch discover what he anticipates to be his post-wrestling career. He hopes to go to graduate school and have the coaching staff hire him as an assistant coach.
Beyond that, the English major would like to become a high school teacher – a profession that may not have been on his radar without wrestling.
“One thing that’s led me to realize how much I like teaching is because of all the wrestling camps I’ve done during the summers," he said. "I’ve built up that skill set of talking to kids, whether it’s about wrestling or off the mat stuff as well."
While he's still enjoying the sport, it is an all-consuming process to become one of the best wrestlers in the nation – a process that Welch is prepared to soon leave behind. Despite the impressive resume, Welch expects next season to be his last as a competitor, choosing to forgo any potential Olympic opportunities that could arise upon graduation.
“At this point of my life, it more of is like a lifestyle then even a sport." He added, “I feel like it’s been rigorous enough for me and it would be nice to stay really involved in coaching but just do something else for once.”
If anyone deserves some time off, it is certainly Welch.