The story was so good, it just had to be true. Only it wasn’t.
Still, it was such a fun story that Will Taisacan rolled with it. He even stopped denying it when he heard it.
Will Taisacan, the legend goes, only went out for wrestling because he was cut from the basketball team as a freshman at Mountain View High School.
Now a senior, Taisacan has made it to the state wrestling tournament all three years of high school, including fourth-place finishes as a sophomore and a junior.
He does fancy himself a good basketball player in pick-up games. It’s just that at 5-feet, 2-inches, he never figured organized basketball was in his future. Sorry to be a myth-buster, but he never went out for Mountain View basketball.
It is true, though, that he had never wrestled until high school.
That, there, is quite the story.
“You look like you can wrestle,” Taisacan recalled the words he heard from a wrestling coach as he walked the halls at school.
“I don’t know about that,” Taisacan responded.
Still, he was intrigued. He decided to give it a try.
“My first week, I recall it being really, really hard. It was really tough,” Taisacan said. “That first week I thought about quitting. But once I’m hooked on to something, I want to keep on moving.”
He saw the more experienced wrestlers, the talented older guys on the team.
“I wanted to get that good,” he said.
Now, he wants to be the best.
“I just want to win state. I want to be Mountain View’s first state champion,” Taisacan said. “I’ll do whatever I can to get there.”
Mountain View wrestling coach Eric Dodge said Taisacan is a “silent leader,” the hardest working wrestler on the team who never complains about anything.
“If Mountain View were going to have a first person to be a state wrestling champion, Will emulates who you want that person to be,” Dodge said.
That guy who excelled at pick-up basketball actually picked up wrestling in a hurry.
“I’ve had a passion for wrestling ever since I started. It teaches you a lot,” Taisacan said. “Hard work in the room makes everything easier.”
In order to excel in wrestling, though, he had to excel in the classroom and at home. Taisacan is the oldest of five children. His father and his step-mother have always counted on Will to maintain his responsibilities with the family. Sometimes, those projects, those chores, conflicted with the wrestling schedule.
“Freshman and sophomore year, I was always drained after practice,” Taisacan said.
So he was not always taking care of business at home.
“I started to realize I needed to get it together so I could stay in the sport,” Taisacan said. “I proved I could do all the things I had to do. You’ve got to have your priorities.”
Now, Will Taisacan says, everyone is on the same page. He became more responsible, and his parents support his wrestling.
“That makes me proud,” Taisacan said.
These days, he is focusing on his final year of high school wrestling. He appreciates how much he has improved from that first week, when he thought about quitting.
He won his first match, in a what he described as a “novice” tournament. Then he won that tournament.
“It was a rush. I was doubting myself a little bit, but at the same time I knew I could pull through,” Taisacan said.
It was all about confidence.
By the end of that first season, he was a varsity wrestler. He advanced beyond district, then regionals and reached the Mat Classic in the Tacoma Dome.
“There were so many people there,” Taisacan said. “It was hard to focus on my matches, it was so nerve-racking. I was scared. I’d never been so scared in my life.”
He went 0-2 that year at 106 pounds, then returned to the dome as a sophomore and reached the state semifinals before placing fourth.
“I’m a quick learner,” he said.
He was thrilled with his sophomore season, but not so much his junior year, when he took fourth again.
“I wanted to move up in the chain,” he said. “I didn’t want to be fourth again. I wanted to be first, second, or third.”
The 2016 Mat Classic will be held in a little more than a month. Taisacan, who could wrestle at 106 or 113 pounds this season, plans to be there, and he wants to make school history.
Taisacan wants to have a remarkable story that he can talk about for years — and make it a true story of a state champion from Mountain View.
