Hanover
Williams College wrestling coach Scott Honecker gets earnest teenagers wishing to walk onto his NCAA Division III program all the time. Almost all of them have some sort of wrestling background. The large majority of them quickly learn how competitive the sport is, even at the D-III varsity level, and decide to move on.
Honecker had never met someone like the lean, muscular teenager sitting across from him in his office some four years ago, however. Chris Washington, a two-year starting lacrosse goalkeeper at Hanover High, wanted to wrestle for the Ephmen. As a college freshman. With no prior experience. At any level.
“I was going to try and talk him out of it,” Honecker admitted this week.
He couldn’t.
Know this about Washington: Hard work doesn’t faze him, nor does learning. Without such opportunities, “life loses its flair and drive,” Washington explained this week.
Even with no wrestling options at Hanover and no competitive past (although his father, James, wrestled at Wesleyan back in the day), just horsing around with high school friends and researching the sport on YouTube intrigued Washington. When he attended Williams, the NESCAC school nestled in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, Washington met with Honecker and won him over.
Now a senior nearing completion of his chemistry degree, Washington’s varsity grappling career has concluded. It wasn’t filled with tons of match victories, not even close. It was, however, loaded with gratitude, lessons learned and taught, both for the athlete who put in the work and the coach who required convincing.
“It’s to the point where it’s so unbelievable,” Honecker confessed in a phone interview. “I haven’t advertised this much, because it would make a person think you can try college wrestling, and you can’t.
“Chris Washington? He’s one in a billion.”
Get a load of the new guy. Time to give him an education.
There are dangers to introducing a complete neophyte to wrestling at the college level, Honecker said. Washington was an 18-year-old freshman; he would be hitting the mat with seasoned athletes three and four years his senior. He also would arrive with no working knowledge of the tactics that talented wrestlers employ in matches.
“If nothing else, it was dangerous,” Honecker said. “You’re entering a room with people who are accomplished combat athletes coming out of high school.”
The coach agreed to give Washington his shot so long as he stuck to the Ephs’ three main rules: Show up on time, give your best effort, be a good citizen. “But the kind of unspoken rule is that you need to protect yourself in the wrestling room, too,” Honecker said. “I was worried about that.”
Continuing to gauge Washington’s resolve, Honecker connected the newcomer with a sophomore, Chris Chorzepa, who was on his way to a three-time all-America career at Williams. Washington received the expected lesson.
“He was a heavier weight than me, so you can imagine how that went,” Washington said. “I didn’t know what moves he was going to use. I’d never even set foot on a mat, but it was fun. To this day, he tells me he was shocked that every time he took me down, I got up with a smile every time.”
The Williams squad quickly accepted Washington and helped him build a knowledge base. It also helped to have a classmate who arrived in similar circumstances.
Carl Sangree also walked onto the Ephs’ squad as a freshman four years ago, but he arrived with competitive prep experience from his time at Connecticut’s Taft School. Sangree and Washington were of a similar weight, so Honecker paired them for training.
“We drilled almost every day in practice those first two years,” said Sangree, an Ashford, Conn., native, in a phone interview. “It wasn’t teaching, but when we were figuring stuff out, we were trying to figure it out together.
“The first year, I beat him easily when it came down to simulated matches in practice. Starting sophomore year, he would start to take me down and score points. As a junior, he would beat me. By his senior year, he beat me most of the time. That gives you a good sense of his learning curve.”
Washington’s career record — while not loaded with victories — reflected it as well.
Placed into the 174-pound division, Washington lost all eight of his freshman matches, seven by pin and the eighth by tech fall, wrestling’s equivalent of a mercy-rule decision. As the learning continued, the wins finally followed: Washington picked up his first two career victories, one pin and one decision, at Springfield (Mass.) College’s Doug Parker Invitational on Nov. 21, 2015, and three more followed out of 19 total contests the rest of the season.
“It’s showed me that, in my freshman year, I was able to learn enough to essentially catch up to guys doing this much longer than I have,” Washington said. “Especially with wrestling, it’s very, very personal and a physically painful thing where you wrestle a whole season without winning — even with the perspective of never having done this before — and it can get to you. When you go out and win one, it keeps you hungry.”
Honecker was impressed. “That’s pretty good; that’s pretty remarkable,” he said. “And that’s probably where it plateaued out for him.”
Washington dislocated his shoulder and tore his labrum that summer wrestling in the Bay State Games. Not wanting to miss his Williams season, he decided against surgery and went 3-14 over the course of the winter. Although repaired, Washington felt the operation affected his senior campaign, with a 3-18 match mark resulting.
“Talk about a testament to a kid’s passion for wrestling,” Honecker remarked.
Oh, boy. This is going to be interesting.
Wrestling teams can enter as many as 10 athletes, one per weight class, in the NCAA Division III Northeast regional tournament. Honecker tries to fill all of the Ephs’ slots each February.
He wanted Washington, who had moved up to 184 pounds as a senior and would also wrestle at 197 pounds during the campaign, to finally get his shot at regionals. To do so would require some lineup shifting: Sangree was set at 197, another teammate had 184, but Honecker had an opening at heavyweight (maximum weight: 285 pounds), having dismissed an athlete from the roster earlier in the season.
He offered the slot to Washington, who accepted knowing he would be facing significantly larger athletes. Williams assistant coach Tom Foote, a former college heavyweight, helped prepare Washington for the meet.
“He prepped me to feel what that difference was when somebody 285 pounds, or more likely 240 pounds, clubs you on the back of your head,” Washington said. “It was going to be a tough road at any (weight) class; that level of competition is so high. But you can get luckier at heavyweight because you find, at the D-III level, they don’t always rely as much on the same technical aspects that smaller (wrestlers) are and they rely more on size and strength. That can change how the matches turn out.”
Not in this case, however.
Washington first slotted against the meet’s top heavyweight, Wesleyan’s Isaiah Bellamy, and he held his own for the first minute of the match before being pinned in 2:03. Bellamy would go on to place third in the NCAA D-III championship tournament in Cleveland two weeks later.
“After the match, he congratulated me and complimented me,” Washington recalled. “He said I had (guts) for getting out there.”
Moved to the consolation bracket, Washington met Roger Williams junior Adam Patsun next. On the afternoon of Feb. 24, 2018, on the mat at Worcester (Mass.) Polytechnic Institute, Chris Washington’s unexpected and unusual college wrestling journey closed with a 7-2 defeat.
“You shake the guy’s hand, take you anklets off, and I just went over to my coaches, both of them, and gave them a big hug,” Washington said. “There really wasn’t much to say. I was just grateful, definitely grateful.”
Chris Washington will be in a number of venues in the coming months as his time at Williams winds down.
He’s been a member of the school’s Williams Octet a cappella singing group for four years. The group sang the national anthem at Yankee Stadium last year; Washington, who can handle either baritone or tenor roles, enjoys the interactions with the alumni who return for regular reunions and concert performances.
He’s also trying something new: broadcasting. Williams sports information director Dick Quinn recruited Washington to be a color commentator for women’s lacrosse webcasts. Washington’s personal critique: “I wouldn’t want to listen to a playback of that first one, I’ll say that much. How do you practice that?”
He may return to Cedar Circle Farm in East Thetford, where he’s worked the last seven summers, or he may just see what a chemistry degree from a NESCAC school can get him. He won’t likely step onto a wrestling mat again, however, at least not in a competitive environment.
Washington has achieved most all of the goals he held when he walked into Scott Honecker’s Williams College wrestling office nearly four years ago.
“I didn’t say this to anybody, but my ultimate goal was to train, get good enough to be a starter at some weight and, by my senior year, make it to regionals,” Washington said. “I didn’t think I’d go at 285, but I was happy to go.”
And now Honecker has a conundrum. Another earnest teenager, new to the school’s campus, is bound to contact him someday, seeking a meeting, hoping the coach will let him on the wrestling team, perhaps with little or no prior experience.
“Wrestling is a hard sport as it is; even if you’re a dominant wrestler, there are so many hard aspects,” said Sangree, Washington’s four-year teammate. “You’re likely to deal with a lot of it during practice, and then in weight training. Even winning is hard, and it’s especially hard when your first two years are full of consecutive losses. I think it taught me about mental fortitude, how to look long-term and not think about the match you’ve just lost but those that you can win if you stick with it.”
“The nice thing about Chris is you never had to question the stuff he could control: his work ethic, his zest for learning, his social decisions, his passion for the sport of wrestling,” Honecker said. “We’re proud of the way he was able to feed off those things. Definitely, Williams wrestling is better for having him come through the program.”
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.