The 2024-25 high school wrestling season will be a special one for Roland High School as the Rangers will have a high school team for the first time in school history.

“Everybody seems to be over the moon about it,” first-year Roland wrestling coach Brian Foster said. “We’re super excited. We’re really ready to get it going. We had a really successful youth league year last year, and they wanted it to carry over and see if what I did (with the Roland Youth Wrestling League), if I could get it done at the high school. They asked me, and I’ve been trying to do it for a long time.”

Of course, some of the Rangers are strongly embracing the historic first-ever season of high school wrestling for Roland, while others haven’t fully grabbed the ropes just yet.

“A lot of them are super- perceptive,” Foster said. “There are a few who are standoff-ish. It’s just new. Anything new is kind of scary to some people. It takes a good group of kids that aren’t discouraged from defeat to kind of stand in there and show the other ones that it’s OK to take a chance. I think that’s what is going on right now. We have a spectacular group of kids. They’re doing really good things early.”

The Rangers’ lineup will consist of Cash Nelson at 126 pounds, Austin Foster at 132 pounds, Miguel Chavez-Trammell at 155 pounds, Lucas Younger at 165 pounds, Channing McKinney at 170 pounds, Trevor Nelson at 175 pounds, Drew Simpson at 190 pounds, Abram Nichols at 215 pounds and Hayden Creech at heavyweight.

So far on the young season, McKinney, Nichols and Simpson have had some success.

“We’ve had some of them step up and take on that leadership role,” the first-year Roland coach said. “They’re really smart boys. They’re easy to teach. They catch on quickly. They’re definitely helping bring the program along.”

The Rangers will be in Class 3A, but they will have to wait until next season to get into a district as the team formed in the middle of classification by the Oklahoma Secondary Schools Activities Association. However, the Rangers will be in a Class 3A District Duals event to possibly qualify for the dual state tournament.

So for this year, the Rangers will concen-trate on the Class 3A Regional and State Tournaments at the end of February.

“I think we have a shot with one or two of them, maybe three,” Foster said. “It depends on their decisions. Right now, they’re wrestling good, and I think the best is yet to come.”