money Camanche's Eric Kinkaid recovered from a broken leg in 85 days. Now, he's eyeing an Iowa state wrestling title
A little more than three months ago, Eric Kinkaid was on the field at Waukon High School, his left leg broken, his football season done in the second round of the playoffs — and his senior wrestling season in serious doubt.
Now fast-forward to Thursday morning inside Wells Fargo Arena, and Kinkaid, a senior wrestler for Camanche, stood in the tunnel following his first-round victory, all smiles and confidence.
“This is my last chance,” Kinkaid said, “so I have to put everything out there, no matter what.”
Kinkaid, the 1-seed at 145 pounds in the Class 2A field at this week’s Iowa state wrestling tournament, is back from that gnarly leg injury he suffered at the end of football season. He opened with an efficient 16-0 technical fall over East Marshall’s Kordell Negrete to advance to Thursday’s quarterfinal round.
MORE: Want live updates from Iowa state wrestling action? It's all right here
During that football game back in October — a second-round playoff game against perennial power Waukon — Kinkaid broke his fibula, just above his left ankle. He finished that game with just three rushing attempts and three tackles, one of them a sack.
Kinkaid had been the heartbeat of a Camanche football team that went 6-4 this season. He led the team with 861 rushing yards — at 5.4 yards per carry — and nine touchdowns. He also led the defense with 78 total tackles, including 10 for a loss.
But that night, Oct. 29, he laid on the field with a broken leg, scared that his senior wrestling season might be over before it even started.
“I was very nervous,” Kinkaid said. “I thought my senior season was taken away from me. That’s what my whole career was driving toward. I was really scared.”
Kinkaid immediately underwent surgery to repair his leg, and still now, his foot and ankle are taped and braced. Doctors originally told Kinkaid that sectionals weekend, on Feb. 5 — exactly 99 days after his injury — was the most realistic date to return.
Kinkaid had other plans. An aggressive rehab regimen allowed him to step back on the mat on Jan. 22, a whole 14 days early, and just 85 days after he broke his leg. He’s been nothing short of phenomenal since he’s returned, rolling to a 13-1 overall record with 11 pins, a major decision and Thursday morning’s technical fall.
“A lot of PT, a lot of hard work, good diet, everything I could possibly do,” Kinkaid said. “My plan all along was to get back before they told me I could. I probably would’ve even if they told me not to.”
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Kinkaid entered this season as a title contender at one of 2A’s most intriguing weights. He is a three-time state finalist, and is now 140-18 for his career, according to stats kept by Trackwrestling. He is also the strong favorite to win this week.
At last weekend’s district meet, he emphatically won a bracket that included Vinton-Shellsburg’s top-ranked Cooper Sanders and Davenport Assumption’s fourth-ranked Michael Macias. Kinkaid, ranked No. 2 at his weight by IAWrestle, pinned Sanders in the first period after beating Macias by a 14-6 major decision at the sectionals tournament the week before.
“It prepared me a ton,” Kinkaid said of his postseason path thus far. “That’s the kind of competition I wanted coming into this tournament. My season was cut short, so I wanted as many high-level matches as I could get.”
If Kinkaid can scale the mountain this week, he would put the cherry on top of a tremendous Iowa high school sports comeback story. He would also make a little bit of history, too. Camanche has just four individual state wrestling champs all-time, and the last one came in 1987, when Brent Carstensen won at 126 pounds.
After a ferocious return to competition, Kinkaid hopes his ferocious wrestling tactics will pave the way to the top.
“It’d mean everything,” Kinkaid said. “That’s what I’ve been working for this entire time. That’s my ultimate goal, and I won’t be happy until I have it.”
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Southeast Valley’s Aaron Graves goes from one postseason to another
It’s no surprise that Aaron Graves, Southeast Valley’s star defensive linemen and a future Iowa Hawkeye, is a pretty talented athlete, but even by the lofty standards to which he holds himself, his schedule over the past few weeks has been nutty.
Graves, the 2-seed at 285 pounds in 2A this week, recorded a first-period pin during Thursday’s first round. Later on Thursday night, he and the rest of the Southeast Valley boys basketball team will play in the second round of the 2A substate playoffs at Roland-Story High School. Tipoff is set for 2 p.m.
Then, because of his victory Thursday morning, Graves will be back Friday morning for the 2A wrestling quarterfinals. A win would push him into the semifinals during Friday’s afternoon session, and one step closer to a state wrestling championship.
Pretty busy dude.
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“I’ve had days where you have both practices, but not really a day where you have a meet and a game to get to in the same day,” Graves said. “But you learn throughout the season how to eat right, sleep right, all those little things.”
It helps that Graves wrestles heavyweight — he sits around 260 — so it’s not like he has to worry about the scale. But he is conscious of the fuel he puts into his body to allow himself to have the energy needed for this insane schedule.
Consider what he navigated earlier this month:
On Feb. 10, a Thursday, he scored 22 points, plus seven rebounds, five assists and three steals in the Jaguars’ 53-51 win over Clarion-Goldfield-Dows in the regular season finale.
Two days later, Graves won sectionals to qualify for state.
Two days after that, on Monday, he scored 30 with 11 boards, four assists and seven steals in a 65-57 win over Greene County in the substate opening round.
Graves is averaging 19.1 points per game for the Jaguars this season, who are 12-10 entering Thursday's substate game against Roland-Story (19-2). On the mat, he’s now 27-1 with 20 pins, and is considered a strong contender at a deep weight class this week.
Independence’s Isaiah Weber done due to a rib injury
Independence’s Isaiah Weber, a three-time state finalist and a 2021 state champion, had his season end early on Thursday. The senior injury-defaulted from his first-round match against Saydel’s Austin Chally due to a rib injury.
Weber jumped out to a 4-0 lead after a takedown and a turn, but after Chally escaped, scored a takedown and took Weber to his back for a 5-4 lead, Weber stopped the match while favoring his rib. On the restart, Weber scored a reversal for a 6-5 lead, but stopped the match again 14 seconds into the second period and ultimately defaulted.
Weber had gone 3-0 for Independence during Wednesday’s state duals competition, where the Mustangs reached the 2A final. He finishes with a season record of 39-9, and a career record of 178-20. He has not announced any future plans yet.
A lot of first-round pins
There were 168 matches contested during Thursday’s opening round — 112 in the first round, plus another 56 in the first-round wrestlebacks — and exactly 74 of them, or about 44%, resulted in the matching ending by fall.
That's to be expected when every bracket at every weight is seeded from first through 16th.
Forty-four of them were in the first period, and eight of them were in under a minute. Eddyville-Blakesburg-Fremont’s Skyler Young had the fastest, in just 18 seconds in the wrestlebacks at 285 pounds to advance to Friday’s bloodround.
West Liberty’s Felipe Molina and Assumption’s Aiden Morgan both scored pins in exactly two minutes. Clarion-Goldfield-Dows’ Cale Kirstein had the slowest pin, locking up the fall in 5:39.
That 285-pound bracket had the most of any weight, with eight pins in 12 matches. Five of them were in first-round wins, by Graves, Solon’s Gage Marty, Sioux Center’s Ethan Hooyer, Clarinda’s Logan Green and West Delaware’s Cam Geuther, who pinned Young before Young sped through his second match during the consolation round.
As far as teams go, West Delaware led the way with five pins on Thursday, which is largely why the Hawks are tied for the team race lead. They and Notre Dame-West Burlington both scored 25 points during Thursday’s first session. The Nikes had four pins, along with Vinton-Shellsburg, which sits third with 19 team points. Six other teams scored three pins.
Cody Goodwin covers wrestling and high school sports for the Des Moines Register. Follow him on Twitter at @codygoodwin.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Class 2A takeaways from Day 1 of 2022 Iowa high school state wrestling
