November 27, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

PC wrestler Botwin enters high school on a roll
by TOM UTESCHER

Freshman wrestler Evan Botwin may be a new addition to the Penn Charter varsity, but he’s probably had more experience and more success in the sport than anyone on the team.

The Chestnut Hill native has been performing on the mat since he was five years old, and by the end of the 2008 club season last summer, he had amassed an incredible total of 627 career victories.

Over the past three years he has won the Area 11 (Southeastern Pa.) Pennsylvania Junior Wrestling championship three times, and at the annual PJW tournament he won the 2008 state championship in his weight class last March, having placed fifth in 2005 and third in 2007.

Among his many other titles, Botwin is the two-time defending champion of the Cliff Keen Eastern World Championships (a highly regarded event in West Virginia), and in the Middle Atlantic Wrestling Association he has won four district championships and three regional crowns. A Penn Charter student since kindergarten, he began to compete for the Quakers in middle school, and was undefeated as a seventh- and eighth-grader.

This winter, in his first varsity season, he’ll be wrestling in the lightest high school weight category, 103 lbs. He still only weighs 97 lbs., but he’s overcome many bigger and stronger opponents in the past.

Jeff Bender, Charter’s second-year varsity coach (and a 1998 graduate of the school) said of Botwin: “I saw him wrestle in the middle school matches, and he’s just a great technician. One of his middle school coaches likened him to a surgeon; he’s got a huge arsenal of moves and he just steps on the mat and goes to work.”

Botwin doesn’t have a family background in the sport. His father didn’t wrestle, and obviously his older sister, Barbara Lally, didn’t either. A senior who played tennis for Penn Charter, she will be the wrestling team manager this winter.

Botwin began to take karate classes when he was about four years old, but at that level the regimen consisted of learning positions and poses, and he found it a little boring. His family was living around the Port Richmond section of the city at the time, and a nearby Police Athletic League (PAL) center happened to be the only one in Philadelphia that offered wrestling. The young athlete soon traded his karate gi for a wrestling singlet.

“I liked the fact that it was more physical,” he recalled, “and I liked the practices because it helped me sleep at night when I got home.”

He tried many other sports as he grew older. He still plays soccer and tennis at school, and he’s also participated in football, baseball, basketball, and lacrosse. Wrestling remained his favorite.

“It’s very demanding, but when you win it pays off,” he said. “I remember a quote from Dan Gable [the storied Olympic wrestler and coach] where he said ‘Once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is easy.’ “

The importance of perseverance is a lesson he absorbed during his years of tournament competition. He recalled that in one of his first matches at the 2008 state tournament in Erie, Pa., he was forced into overtime in a qualifying bout. He prevailed to stay alive in the tourney bracket, and later on he won the final in a convincing decision, 11-0.

“The main thing I learned,” he related, “is that you have to stay calm in all situations,” he said. “Whether you’re winning or losing, you always have to stick it out.”

A true student of the support, Botwin finds that his cerebral approach carries over into the classroom, where he enjoys the problem-solving aspects of mathematics.

“I also like the sciences,” he said, “because since I was pretty young I’ve been interested in learning how the body works.”

Although there are a number of seniors on the wrestling team at PC this season, most of them took up the sport only recently.

“Evan is already a bit of a leader, even though he’s a freshman,” Bender said. “He’s a really hard worker, and he tries to get other guys to come out for the team.

“It would be easy for someone who’s had so much success to become a bit self-absorbed,” the coach continued. “That’s not the case with Evan, though. One of the great things about him is that he really appreciates the team experience.”