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Deanna Betterman chuckled at the simple notion of her kids spending extended time away from a wrestling mat.
“What’s the offseason schedule like?” the Sand Creek High wrestling coach was asked Friday morning, as the mats at Ball Arena began to bustle again.
“There is no offseason,” Betterman said.
This weekend, three wrestlers from Sand Creek High, a public school in Colorado Springs, advanced to or beyond the girls’ 4A semifinals of the Colorado state wrestling championships at Ball. All three wrestle for a girls’ program in its very first season of existence. All three, improbably, are freshmen: Peggy Dean (100 pounds), Stella Isensee (105 pounds), and Karris Carter (130 pounds). All three came by way of the Betterman Elite Wrestling Club, a youth academy in Colorado Springs run by Betterman’s husband Joe, a former Team USA wrestler.
Sand Creek wrestlers only actually attend classes in person on Monday and Wednesday during the school year, Betterman said. On Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, they arrive at the Betterman Elite gym at 8 a.m., practice from 9-11, shower, eat lunch, do online classes, and then have a second training session at 4:30 p.m. They take roughly one month off from this schedule in August. Last spring, the academy sent Dean and others — then in eighth grade — to Tallin, Estonia, for the largest wrestling tournament in Europe.
Dean won a gold medal.
“When we’re looking at the big goals, we’re looking at the Olympics for Peggy Dean, Karris Carter, all those girls,” Betterman said. “So these are just little stepping stones we’re hitting. We don’t put a lot of pressure on winning state titles and these little things.
“Those little things just happen, when you have those high expectations, and those high goals.”
Youth movement
Sand Creek’s triumvirate of prodigies is just a microcosm, truly, of a wide array of younger contenders at the 2026 state wrestling championships this weekend. Eleven different freshmen wrestlers advanced to the semifinals at Ball Arena in the 5A boys’ and girls’ brackets alone.
It’s indicative of a larger trend in Colorado and beyond. To be a powerhouse wrestling program, schools “have to have a feeder program,” as Betterman said — a youth club in the area that can pipe in young talent ready to reach a state stage from Day 1.
“Back in my day, it was the local tournaments,” said 37-year-old Pueblo East head coach Tyler Lundquist. “Now the guys are in bigger buildings than this from 5 years old, until they’re in high school. So the show’s not too big for them, most of these guys.”
Take Air Academy freshman Dylan Saba, a young man whose father wrestled and whose mother, Hillary Wolf Saba, was a two-time Olympian and whose brother Michael is committed to NC State for wrestling. Earlier this season, as Air Academy coach Brandon Lucero recounted, Saba was matched up with reigning 4A 106-pound state champion Tristan Pino, of the Sand Creek High boys’ team.
“This is a normal match for me,” Saba told Lucero, as Lucero recalled. “This is normal.”
Saba, Lucero said, pinned Pino in the second period of the match.
“I take every guy the same. Doesn’t matter … I just trust myself, and I know I’m good enough to beat, I think, anyone in the country,” Saba said Friday.
This extended to state, where Saba has been cutting down from 126 pounds to 120 pounds in preparation since January. This was not a strategy to avoid a more difficult matchup; instead, Saba and Lucero were running directly towards two-time state champion Drake VomBaur of Severance. The goal? Try and beat the toughest possible draw to set Saba up to four-peat at state championships throughout his high school career, a feat only accomplished by 34 wrestlers in Colorado prep history.
“If we get this one, I think he’s going to be pretty tough to stop,” Lucero said. “Which is why we kinda hit the toughest kid (in VomBaur), I could say, could be pound-for-pound in the tournament — to go kinda push that and see if we could do it.”
Saba has a wrestling mat in his basement, and started when he was 4. He is a unicorn at Air Academy, which does not have a traditional feeder youth club. It’s “tough,” as coach Lucero said, to compete with programs in Colorado that do. So from August until November, Lucero drove his wrestlers every day, 45 minutes up I-25 to train at Black Fox Academy, which feeds talent to 5A powerhouse Ponderosa High School.
‘There is no offseason’
It’s become impossible to become a wrestling power in Colorado and beyond, Lucero said, if programs don’t train year-round. Especially if they don’t have a relationship with a youth club.
“It’s making me old fast,” Lucero said. “It’s taken a lot of life out of me, because you’ve gotta turn around really fast, and get kids good quickly.”
At Pueblo East — the favorite in the boys’ 4A bracket — Lundquist holds sessions four days a week in all seasons of the year. They will practice again on Monday, just two days after the state finals. This is a race for advancement, and a race to keep up. And Lundquist has a self-described “blue-chip” talent in freshman Uriah Duran, whose father runs one of the “bigger youth clubs in Pueblo,” Lundquist said.
Duran advanced to the boys’ 4A 113-pound finals after beating Severance sophomore Tatum Garcia 10-0 by major decision Saturday. The freshman is an instinctual wrestler, Lundquist said, who doesn’t need much coaching beyond managing clock and cautions.
“It’s very rare that you see a guy — let’s say, 132 pounds and up as a freshman — having high success,” Lundquist said. “But these smaller-weight guys, right, I mean, their athleticism and their savvy, it just seems to get better and better and better and better.”
Freshman success in heavier-weight classes became less rare this weekend in Colorado, though, as Pomona’s Donovan Symalla toppled Grandview senior Jonathan Montes Gonzalez 4-1 to advance to the final of the boys’ 5A 157-pound class. Symalla began wrestling at the Pomona Wrestling Club, a direct feeder for Pomona’s program, when he was 8. He’s “worn a Pomona singlet forever,” as head coach Sam Federico said.
“I don’t know if he’s going to win this tournament,” Federico said earlier Friday, of Symalla. “He’s got some seniors that are in the semifinal that are really good … I mean, at this point, they’re good, and they’re men.
“And Donovan doesn’t drive a car yet, you know what I mean?”
He did not need a license, however, to beat Gonzalez on Friday night. And Federico anticipates freshmen in Colorado are only going to get “tougher and tougher” as years pass and youth feeders grow, a sentiment shared by a host of coaches in the area.
“The level of wrestling, it doesn’t stop,” Betterman said. “It keeps elevating every year, because of programs like this.”
Air Academy freshman Saba wants to four-peat. Lundquist thinks Pueblo East freshman Duran can four-peat. Sand Creek High athletic director Mario Romero thinks the girls’ program can challenge for a state title in two years, once they import more talent from Betterman Elite.
The only thing that might be standing in the way of this youth movement, ultimately, is the youth underneath them.
“I can definitely sense it,” Dean said, after advancing to the girls’ 4A 100-pound final Friday.
“I obviously want the younger people to become better than me, and the people younger than them to become better than them. The competition, and the levels, are definitely rising.”
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Luca Evans
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