Not long ago, Aidan Torres couldn’t do this.
That’s probably why a smile spread across the Chesterton senior’s face as he looked ahead to the final week of the season.
“I’m getting excited,” Torres said. “I feel like, after this tournament, the pace really changes.”
The unbeaten Torres continued his march to the state meet by winning the 145-pound weight class during the East Chicago Central Semistate on Saturday.
Torres (48-0), an Indiana commit who is ranked No. 1 at 145 by IndianaMat, is one of three state qualifiers for Chesterton, which will also send junior Isaiah Wilson (120) and senior Ben Shaffer (160) on Friday. It will be the fourth appearance at state for Torres, who finished sixth at 126 as a freshman, eighth at 132 as a sophomore and third at 145 last season.
About three months after the 2022 state meet, however, Torres’ career was put on hold when he was diagnosed with an annular tear in one of the discs in his back.
“It’s something that had been bothering me over the course of a few years, and I finally decided to go in during the summer,” he said.
The offseason is mostly just a rumor for wrestlers of Torres’ caliber. They typically spend the summer months traveling across the country in search of the best competition available. But for Torres last summer, there were no matches to find while he gave his body time to heal.
With his schedule for June, July and August suddenly wide open, Torres did what most other high school kids do in those months: He enjoyed his summer break from school.
“That was the longest I’d gone without wrestling since I was 8 years old,” he said. “I slept in a lot. I played some video games. It was nice. I had a lot of friends who were seniors going off to school, so I was hanging out with them at grad parties. And I went to the beach a lot.”
When the preseason rolled around in October, Torres was eager to get back on the mats, even if he knew the road back was going to be exhausting.
“My conditioning was horrible,” he said with a laugh. “It set me back a ton. But I knew I was going to come back at some point, that the injury was only temporary.”
Torres was back to 100% when the season started and had Chesterton coach Andy Trevino, a former state champion who graduated from Calumet in 1991, available to guide him. Trevino drew on his experiences dealing with a back fracture he suffered during his wrestling career at Indiana.
“We talked about the things I had to do to train and to recover,” Trevino said. “He’s a little more dialed in on his body now, and he knows that he can’t push certain things in certain places. He educated himself on the way he attacks things to keep his body safe.”
It all worked for Torres, who won the third semistate title of his career on Saturday when Crown Point senior Anthony Bahl injury-defaulted for the championship match.
Torres’ path to a state title could still go through Bahl, his friend for nearly a decade. Bahl, who has been trying to pace himself after being diagnosed with a hole in one of his lungs earlier this season, is ranked No. 2 at 145 by IndianaMat. He will join Torres in Bloomington next season.
Since they’re on opposite sides of the bracket, any meeting between the two would happen in the championship round at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Saturday night.
Torres and Bahl, who said their friendship developed at wrestling camps in Northwest Indiana, also agreed it would be put on hold for the three periods of a state championship match.
“Once we step on the mat, there’s no friendship out there,” Bahl said with a laugh.
“We’ll just go at it,” Torres said. “When you’re out there, you just get in the zone.”
Before that match happens, Torres may steal a moment to take in the atmosphere at the final state meet of his career.
“I had the realization last year that high school goes by fast, and all of those seniors told me not to take anything for granted,” he said. “Having that break in the summer made me miss wrestling. So I’ve been trying to soak everything in.”
Dave Melton is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.