Nottingham High wrestling coach Jason Marasco looks at heavyweight Sylvester Freeman’s glittering record this year and understands just how much pain went into it.
“He took plenty of beatings,” Marasco said. “There were plenty of guys ahead of him that beat the crap out of him when he was younger. He had a partner who would try to hurt him every day. He would just start ripping on his elbow at practice, grinding his elbow in the neck. He’s a gentle giant. I would say, ‘He’s such a jerk to you, punch him in the face,’ but he never did anything back. So that definitely toughened him up.”
Freeman is indeed gentle and does have giant size at over 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds. He is a soft-spoken man of few words, but makes plenty of noise on the mat when going against someone wearing an opposing singlet.
And he admits those early lumps he took have definitely paid off.
“I got beat up a lot,” he said. “It made me want to try to get pins and a lot of the moves I tried on them, I actually took them down a couple times. That gave me confidence to go against other people.”
And that confidence is paying off, as Freeman won his second straight Mercer County title Jan. 27. At press time, he had only lost one match all season.
A football player at heart, the two-way lineman had no desire to wrestle until Marasco visited the team during practice of Freeman’s freshman year.
“I became interested, mainly because he said it would get us better at football, and I would say it did,” he said. “It made me more athletic, gave me better feet, better hands, and it helped conditioning-wise too. And getting takedowns, it helped transition to tackling better.”
Freeman, who hopes to play football at Susquehanna University, wrestled strictly JV as a freshman and went 5-6.
“It was tough, I didn’t know a lot,” he said. “I wasn’t in condition at the time, practices were hard. I came home tired every day, then I’m trying to do school work and then having to wrestle the upperclassmen.”
He had made the commitment, however, and was not about to back out.
“I wasn’t gonna quit, that’s not the type of person I am,” he said. “I wanted to stick through things.”
The following year, he was 12-2 on JV and went 4-2 at 220 pounds on varsity after injuries struck in the upper weights.
“I was pretty confident,” he said. “I had a decent record on JV so I had a lot of confidence. I was the back-up for the heavyweight and when our 220 guy got hurt I had to cut to 220 but I was still confident in my ability.”
One thing that Freeman showed consistently through those first two years, was an intense work ethic. Marasco noted that before each practice, the wrestlers would mop the mats and then go on a run through the hallways for five to 10 minutes while waiting for them to dry.
“You know a kid’s legit when even in warm-ups he’s working hard,” the coach said. “During those runs, some kids are barely moving their feet, or they’re shuffling their feet. This kid’s running hard. He’s coming around the corner, he’s sprinting his butt off. Nobody better get in his way because he’s flying, he’s giving it all he’s got. He does all the right things all of the time. It’s not like a once-in-a-while thing where ‘I’m gonna be good because someone else is watching me.’ He’s good all the time. He’s been like this from the time he came in.”
After paying his dues, Freeman had a breakout junior season, going 25-13, winning the Mercer County and District 25 tournament championships, and getting beaten by a state champion contender in the regionals after hurting himself in a fall just prior to the tournament.
“He did it on Tuesday, he could barely walk,” Marasco said. “He came to regions, I’m like, ‘Dude, just go sit.’ I didn’t want any of his opponents seeing him limping around. He was limping that bad. I put him out there on Friday just to get the match for the advancement points, and he wrestled the number one seed.”
Freeman was not about to be a sacrificial lamb, and reversed his opponent early in the match.
“The kid freaked out when he reversed him,” Marasco said. “But all this pressure went on his leg, and he fell to the ground. He had a high ankle sprain, but he went out and didn’t hesitate and took down the number one kid in the region.”
Despite the unfortunate loss, Freeman utilized it, saying, “I definitely have used that as motivation to get better this year.”
So far, so good. Freeman opened the season by winning the Outstanding Wrestler in the season-opening Nottingham Invitational. He has pinned nearly every opponent in his first 19 bouts and his only loss was in the Collingswood Tournament to a Pennsville opponent who was a top 20 finisher in the state last year.
“He lost to him by one point,” Marasco said. “He literally needed three more seconds. Sylvester took a shot with 20 seconds left and he’s in on the kid, but the kid got him in a headlock. He’s trying to drag out, the buzzer goes off and he drags out like, a half second later. That kid was holding on for dear life and Sylvester was still coming at him, he still had gas in the tank.”
Once again, Freeman took something from a loss, saying, “He kind of shut down my offense, so I learned to have more moves in my back pocket.”
Having moves is what has made Freeman so tough at heavyweight, despite being smaller than most of his opponents. He gets through by combining strength and finesse.
“He’s not big but he’s strong, he’s fast, he’s slick,” Marasco said. “If he knows the kid has him by 40 or 50 pounds, he’ll do something slick. He’ll be real strategic. I could talk about that all day long ‘til I’m blue in the face, but until a kid realizes it’s the right time to be slick, he won’t really be good at it. But Freeman already knows it.”
It is that type of savvy that has not just Marasco singing Freeman’s praises, but so many others in the Nottingham community as well.
“He’s well respected by everybody in the school, not just the team,” Marasco said. “He’s a really good kid, he gets good grades. And for us, he’s a stud, he’s like the total package. He works his butt off, he’s extremely coachable. He’s one of my captains, he’s a great leader. He never misses practice and never has an excuse. I wish I had a whole team of kids like that because it would all be a helluva lot easier.”
Nottingham High senior Sylvester Freeman, shown here earlier this year, started the postseason by winning his second straight Mercer County title Jan. 27, 2018. (Photo by Wes Kirkpatrick.),
