Takedown Report

Alirez wins Junior Dan Hodge Trophy

By Mike Finn
Winning four state championships in Colorado and many other national honors was not as easy as it looked for Andrew Alirez the past four years. After all, the nation’s top-ranked wrestler, who pinned 98 foes in compiling a 160-1 record — and flattened 29 of 37 foes in an undefeated senior season — in his career at Greeley Central High School, dealt with a broken thumb early in his junior season. He also got a chance to see how his father, whose first name is also Andrew and served as both a coach and drilling partner throughout much of his high school career, overcame shoulder and knee injuries. “That just shows you have to have that dog in you,” said the younger Alirez, whose nickname is “Boo Boo” after hanging out as a child with his father, whose nickname was Yogi. “When we do drill, we go hard. He’s a go-er. He won’t stop, which makes me push harder.

“(He also showed me) you have to find that way to push through (any pain). That’s something that is going to help me in the college season. It’s impossible to go through a whole college season without something going wrong.” And it’s that fortitude that also earned the future University of Northern Colorado wrestler the 2019 WIN Magazine Junior Dan Hodge Trophy, which is presented annually by the AAU to the nation’s most dominant high school wrestler and named after Dan Hodge, the three-time Oklahoma national champion.

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April 28, 2019 - Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized