Rossville’s Zach Archer had the opposite problem, and it wasn’t until he piled on a few pounds that he really started piling up wins.
Archer, the Topeka Shawnee County winter male athlete of the year, finished his high school career as a two-time state champion, winning Class 3A-1A state crowns as a junior and senior while topping the 100-win mark for his career.
Archer never did get out of the lower weights, wrestling at 106 pounds as a junior and 113 as a senior, but as he got bigger, so did his accomplishments, with Archer posting an 80-5 record over his final two high school seasons and winning back-to-back titles.
“He wasn’t a bad wrestler as a freshman — he was actually still pretty tough — but he was probably 85 pounds, so he was JV that year,” Rossville coach Courtney Horgan said.
“His sophomore year he was 27-17 (qualifying for state), but he was still about 95 to 97 pounds, so he was still way under-sized. He had a decent year, but anybody that was a full 106 he had trouble with.”
But a slight change in his body type and a big change in his confidence made Archer a star over the remainder of his prep career.
“He wasn’t always winning, but he wrestled hard and then his junior year I think the momentum started rolling and his attitude changed and he just started believing a little bit more and was like, ‘You know what, I am pretty good,’ ” Horgan said.
“By the halfway point in his junior year, me and the other two assistants told him every single day, ‘You’re the best kid in the state.’ Every day we made it a point to tell him that and he just started believing it. It was really neat watching him kind of transform mentally into believing that.”
Archer won by major decisions in the state finals as both a junior and senior, taking an 11-3 win over Osage City’s Connor Collins as a senior to cap a 41-1 season.
“I make all of the wrestlers fill out a goal sheet every year and then they hang them in their locker and they see them every day,″ Horgan said. “Undefeated state champ was his goal for his senior year. He didn’t have any others. That was the one goal that he had and he darn near did it.”
Archer, who is headed to the University of Kansas as a student after compiling a 3.95 grade point average at Rossville, also got the rare opportunity to end his wrestling career with a championship.
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