School: Quakertown
Wrestling
Favorite athlete: Chase Utley
Favorite team: Penn State
Favorite memory competing in sports: Winning ‘Most Outstanding Wrestler’ at districts
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: “When I was playing flag football as a little kid, I was running for my first touchdown ever and my pants fell down my butt as I crossed the end zone line.”
Music on iPod: “I listen to anything.”
Future plans: Becoming a medical specialist
Words to live by: “Work half as hard, look twice as good.”
One goal before turning 30: “To own my own medical practice.”
One thing people don’t know about me: “I have more clothes than most girls, and I have been to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia.”
Nick Lubenetski is a good-natured, easygoing young man.
Until the Quakertown senior steps onto the wrestling mat.
“He’s one of the nicest, kindest kids you’ll ever see,” wrestling coach Kurt Handel said. “You put him in a little competitive atmosphere, like a practice room or the mats, and he’s a completely different person.
“His competitive spirit comes out. I tell some of his teachers how hard he goes at practice and how he can be very aggressive and nasty at times, and they’re like, ‘No way, not Nick. He’s too good, he’s too nice.”
Lubenetski has found a way to keep his two personas in their proper places.
“I talk about it with my mom, and to be a wrestler, you have to have an attitude, you have to be mean,” he said. “You have to know when to control it, and you can’t mix it in the classroom. They’re totally different atmospheres.
”In wrestling, you just get in a zone, and you kind of let yourself go.”
Lubenetski recently won his first ever sectional title, and he followed that by winning his weight class (152) at the District One North Tournament and copping Most Outstanding Wrestler honors.
Quite a finish to a season that saw Lubenetski go through a life-altering experience in early December.
That’s when his father, mentor and fan, Mark Lubenetski, suffered a heart attack. Initially, it wasn’t believed to be life-threatening, but a day later, his father took a dramatic turn for the worse.
“It was one of those nights when it was ‘Dad is going to pull through or he’s not going to make it,’” Handel recalled. “At noontime the next day, we received a phone call saying his dad had made tremendous strides and was on his way.”
Nick Lubenetski spent the entire week by his father’s side and missed a pair of matches.
“I wanted to be there to support him because he was more important than wrestling,” Nick said. “I was constantly at the hospital.
“He was my number one fan. He always takes me to my matches and everything.”
The wrestling team as well as family and friends were there to support Lubenetski.
“The thing with my wrestling team – we’re a close-knit community,” Nick said. “That (experience) was very influential in my life.
“It just showed me how you can lose someone so quickly and how you should appreciate how much people do for you in your life.”
It was through his father – the president of Quakertown Youth Wrestling - that Nick became involved in the sport.
Interestingly, he didn’t take an immediate liking to wrestling and clearly had not developed the competitive fire that now drives him on the mat.
“Whenever I would lose, I would cry, and whenever I thought I was losing, I would cry,” Lubenetski said with a laugh. “My coach always used to yell at me, but I couldn’t really help it.
“I have pictures of me beating kids with my hand raised at the end of the match, and I’ll be crying.”
Lubenetski also played baseball and football, and to this day, at 6-2, 152, he looks more like a basketball player than a wrestler.
Yet, it was wrestling that ultimately became his passion as the other two sports fell by the wayside.
“You develop friends, and they keep you going, and they’re there every day, and it also helps when you start winning,” Lubenetski said, admitting that his body type did not suggest he had a future in wrestling. “I have a friend on the team, and when we came in as freshmen, they used to call us Raggedy Ann and Andy or the Stick Boys.
“I rarely wrestle people who are taller.”
“He’s been the tall, lanky guy,” Handel said. “He was never the muscular guy.
“He’s such a hard worker. He has the body of a basketball player, but he’s all heart, he’s all desire, he’s all drive.”
Lubenetski didn’t experience immediate success when he entered high school.
“My freshman year I got thrown into the lineup and got beat up a lot, but as long as you keep going and keep your head up, good things will turn out as long as you keep trying,” he said.
Good things have happened, not the least of which was earning OW honors at districts.
“That meant a lot to me,” Lubenetski said. “It shows a lot about the hard work I put in.
“I was going to gladiator in the off-season, and it shows how the extra time you put in influences your wrestling.”
Lubenetski is not only an outstanding wrestler, he’s also a top flight student and a well-liked one at that – last fall, he was elected Homecoming King. A member of the National Honor Society, he plans to major in biology/pre-med, although he has not decided on a college.
“He really excels in the classroom,” Handel said. “He’s self-motivated when it comes to academics.
“We have a study hall before practice every day. During the season when guys don’t know something, they’ll ask Nick because they know he’ll have the answer.”
Lubenetski also was a captain of the league and district champion Panther squad.
“You watch professional sports and you hear about guys that are the nicest guys in the locker room but on the field you don’t know who they are. That’s Nick - he’s a very fierce competitor.
“Off the mat, he always has a smile – he’s such a happy-go-lucky kid.”
A happy-go-lucky kid who has won a lot of wrestling matches during a stellar high school career.
