Wrestling
By Mary Jane Souder
Matt Beck is hardly your typical wrestler.
When the Springfield senior opted to go out for the school’s team last year, his experience consisted of attending a few practices as an eighth grader and wrestling in one jayvee match.
So why go out for such a grueling sport as a junior? Beck explains.
“Up until eighth grade, baseball was my main sport, but I didn’t have the skill set,” he said. “It was more just for fun.
“Freshman year I didn’t do any sports, and sophomore year I ran track in the spring because I thought it would be a great way to stay fit, and being on a team would help me work out. My friend, James Guckin, encouraged me to try out for the wrestling team. I thought it was more of a full body workout, so that’s why I switched to wrestling last year and that’s why I stayed with it.”
Beck didn’t walk into the wrestling room and make an immediate impact. As a matter of fact, he’s still looking to get his first pin, but he’s been a welcome and positive addition to the team.
“He’s one of those kids – he’s a gamer, he’s a fighter,” coach Corey McCaslin said. “He’s willing to go any weight at any point for the team.
“He really served as our filler guy in a sense last year. Never a complaint, never a question, just always relishing that opportunity to get on the mat. Always giving full effort, and what he lacks in experience, he certainly makes up for in heart.”
Listening to Beck tell it, the experience has been nothing but positive.
“It’s an interesting sport along with a fun sport,” he said. “Sometimes at long practices, (it’s tough), but when you get to live wrestling and wrestling in a match, it’s a lot more fun.
“That’s what you do it for. I know I’m not the best wrestler on the team, and I see a lot of the younger kids have a lot more potential and they have a lot of drive. Even though they’re younger than me, they know more about the sport than me. They have more experience, they have more skill, and that’s one of the things I like watching.”
As for filling in for different weight classes, Beck doesn’t mind a bit, and he’s seen many benefits from his experience with the team.
“I thought about this,” he said. “Especially in the wrestling room during hard workouts – it shows me that you can’t just stop when you want to.
“You have to keep pushing because you have your teammates you’re letting down, you have yourself you’re letting down if you give up easily. You really just have to give it your all.”
Perhaps Beck’s refreshing perspective is the result of the fact that his interests are so diverse. Wrestling is just a very small piece of his life.
“Matt is an intellectual,” McCaslin said. “He’s a very bright kid. I have him in AP Calculus class, he’s the president of the Robotics Club.
“He’s a kid with just a natural curiosity about the world and just a broad, broad range of things. He’s willing to jump in with both feet in a varied litany of activities. It’s rare that kids will spread themselves out that way and take that risk - whether academic or athletic – without fear of failure. Wrestling was sort of a different avenue for him.”
Springfield proved to be the perfect setting for Beck to take the plunge.
“Springfield is a little different because we’re so small, so sometimes kids will give sports a try here just because our numbers are typically smaller than anywhere else, and kids get the opportunity to give it a go and sometimes see meaningful time, and that was the case with Matt,” McCaslin said. “It’s always a struggle for us to fill a lineup, given our numbers, and that creates an opportunity for someone like that to come out and take some lumps but do so on behalf of the team and try to set us up to succeed as a team.”
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Beck would be the first to admit that sports – although he enjoys them - aren’t necessarily his forte.
“I wasn’t so good at coordinating myself with a ball,” he said.
The Springfield senior certainly didn’t need wrestling to pad his resume. He already had an impressive list of extracurricular activities.
A member of the Boy Scout program for six years and Cub Scouts five years before that, Beck earned his prestigious Eagle Scout badge in July of 2016. His project - creating educational games for the playground of his preschool.
“I was scouting out spots, thinking maybe a renovation,” Beck said. “I brought my mom with me because she might have had some ideas.
“She talked to me about this idea, and I thought it was a good idea because it added to the educational value of the place.”
Beck used flat boards approximately 1 ½ x 2 feet with no moving parts.
“I came up with the designs for it, and we just hung them around the playground,” he said. “One of them was a frog on one side and a lily pad on another, and it was a maze so they can trace it with their finger. Others were simple math – 1+2=3, and I used pictures of squirrels to demonstrate.
“If there are kids that are tired of running around outside, they can go over and learn something on the boards.”
Beck is the president of Springfield’s Robotics club and was instrumental in breathing some much-needed life into the program.
“My brother, Andy Beck, was interested in robotics, and when I was younger, I used to go to the events they had and some of the building periods, so I got interested in that and started going.
“It’s something I really enjoy, especially the organization part. My freshman year we were teamed with Cheltenham, but our school wanted to start its own program, so they asked me, my brother and Andrew Posmontier to help start it again. Sophomore year we started a smaller club in our school, and we gave out fliers and stuff, encouraging people to come to the meetings.
“This is our third year, and we’re doing a lot better. Organization-wise, we learned a lot about ordering parts and the processes we should go through to get stuff done on time efficiently and with good communication.”
The Robotics Club took part in its first competition in October and has another scheduled for this month.
A photography buff, Beck – as a freshman – was a photographer for the school newspaper. The following year he signed up for the yearbook and was named the photo editor his junior year.
An excellent student with a course load of AP classes, Beck is a member of the National Honor Society. He is undecided about his future plans.
“For a while, I was thinking about the Navy, but I decided not to go that route,” he said. “I’m not exactly sure yet. Right now it’s kind of unclear.
“It’s probably between business and a field called emergency management, which is basically responding to disasters and crises in cities and such. I actually applied to colleges thinking I would be majoring in engineering. Most likely I’ll go to one of those colleges and transfer to a business school and see how I like those kinds of classes.”
Beck is active in his church youth group, and it’s a safe bet he brings the same qualities to that group as he does to his countless activities at Springfield.
“He’s a very nice kid,” McCaslin said. “He has great leadership abilities, and he’s a very mature presence in our room.
“He’s a guy that will get on the mat with anyone, whether it be at practice or a match. I need someone to drill with the heavyweight, he’ll say, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ He’s just that kind of kid.”
