Navigating the Difficult Road to All-American Wrestler

    When given the choice of either grappling with the nation’s toughest wrestlers or having to battle kidney stones, Barrington’s varsity wrestler Jared Parvinmehr feels it is any easy choice.

“I would rather wrestle,” he said after finishing fifth in the Greco-Roman ASICS/Vaughan Junior and Cadet National Championships held at Fargo, N.D.

“I tried to wrestle with the kidney stones” in an earlier tournament, Parvinmehr, the Greco All-American went on to say. “But that area (of the body) was just too tender.”

Contending with kidney stones wasn’t exactly in Parvinmehr’s plan when he began his summer wrestling, which started by winning state in freestyle at 112 pounds; rather he was focused on gearing up for the nation’s best wrestlers.

Moving on to compete in the Central Regional Tournament in Indiana, Parvinmehr continued his impressive wrestling by qualifying for the Fargo National Tournament with his first-place finish in both freestyle and Greco in the 112-pound weight category.

Unfortunately, it was the time off between the regional and national tournaments, while participating in the Junior Duals in Oklahoma, which forced Parvinmehr to the sidelines with kidney stones, despite attempting to wrestle with the ailment.

With a small window of time remaining before the Greco-Roman portion of the National Tournament in Fargo, Parvinmehr, with the rest of Izzy Style School of Wrestling, headed to the University of Illinois and began the daunting task of cutting weight in preparation for the elite competition in Fargo. Cutting weight is not relatively new for the wrestlers, but Parvinmehr did spend much of his varsity season wrestling above his natural weight category, when he wrestled at 119.

“I was conditioning and dieting all to cut weight without affecting technique,” Parvinmehr said of his extensive and exhausting workouts that would last all day.

And the extra workload paid off for him.

He had wrestled in the Fargo tournament in previous years but had failed to crack the top 10. But Parvinmehr wouldn’t lose his first match this year until the later rounds, when he faced last year’s 98-pound Greco-Roman champion, and this year’s eventual champion in the 112 division, Colton Howell of Missouri.  Howell would defeat the Barrington wrestler by only the narrowest of margins in the two periods 1-0, 1-0.

Despite the difficult loss, Parvinmehr stayed focused and on track in the tournament, thanks to the guidance of Stanford’s assistant wrestling coach Ray Blake.

“Coach (Ray) knew how to fire me up,” Parvinmehr said of getting to work with and pick the brain of the collegiate coach.  “He knew what to say to me, and he gave me good advice.”

But the conversations didn’t mention having to face another All-American, since the level of competition wouldn’t taper off in the later rounds. Facing Hawaii’s Cassidy Oshiro, Parvinmehr suffered another heartbreakingly close loss that would have had him wrestling for third place in his final match, but instead positioned him for at a fifth place finish in the tournament.

Parvinmehr’s final bout, to decide fifth and sixth place, was not going to end as closely as the previous rounds. Parvinmehr stayed aggressive and was able to win on technical fall 7-0, 10-3 securing the fifth-place finish in the National Tournament.

“It feels amazing,” Parvinmehr said of the recognition of being an All-American for his fifth-place finish, “and something I wouldn’t have thought was going to happen.”

The win may move Parvinmehr up in the United States’ future Olympian ratings, too.  Parvinmehr is ranked second in the nation with 800 earned points from competing in various meets and matches, trailing Georgia's Darshawn Sharp by only 75 points.

Parvinmehr was hoping to add to his point total and build on his recent success during the freestyle portion of the tournament, but he was unable to because he had to wrestle two classes above his normal weight due to his inability to cut the necessary weight by weigh-ins.

Cutting weight isn’t something new for most wrestlers but it is something relatively new to Parvinmehr, who was used to wrestling at the 119 category on the Bronco varsity team and thus needed to keep weight on. However, wrestling at 125 pounds left little room for error in Parvinmehr’s bracket, and the extra weight he carried proved too much, as he was eventually eliminated by the third round.

Even with the early elimination from the freestyle portion of the tournament Parvinmehr isn’t ready to take time off.