If you want to understand what wrestling means at Galesburg High School, you don’t begin with trophies. You begin with people like Amayah Pruitt, Anthony Makwala, and Coach Greg Leibach—three voices from different stages of life, all shaped by the same relentless, humbling, deeply human sport.

Leibach, now in his tenth year as head coach and a fixture in the district far longer, came to Galesburg by way of St. Louis and Knox College. More than an educator—he teaches art from first bell to last—he has become a steward of a program built on grit, compassion, and generational continuity. “What’s been cool,” he says, “is seeing traditions and qualities passed down from one wave of wrestlers to the next.” The sport demands it. No one goes far alone.

That truth shows up in the stories of the two athletes sitting with him.

Amayah, a junior, joined wrestling almost by accident—gently pulled into the room by a friend, Kimora, whose confidence nudged her past her hesitation. Four years later, the sport feels like home. What struck her first wasn’t the matches or the conditioning, but the culture. “Everybody gets the same amount of undivided attention in the wrestling room,” she says. There’s no favoritism. No hiding. No waiting to be rescued by a teammate. When she steps on the mat, it’s her mind, her training, her resolve. And yet, she never feels alone. “Your coach is always there to help you,” she says. “You can rely on your teammates in basketball. In wrestling, you have to do everything yourself—but you’re never really by yourself.”

Anthony, a senior, nods as she speaks. He knows that tension well. He tried wrestling in sixth grade at the urging of his friend Mason Taylor and hated it. Rough go. Hard to love. He dropped it. But something changed after the pandemic. In eighth grade, he returned, drawn not by ease but by difficulty itself. “I fell in love with the grind,” he says. “Not a lot of people were willing to take it on. I wanted to separate myself from the crowd.”

The sport obliged. His first two weeks as a freshman, Coach Leibach paired him exclusively with the best in the room—Gauge Shipp, Rocky Almanderas, Nick Makwala, Shea. They didn’t break him. They built him. “If I had the mentality from sixth grade, I never would’ve made it,” Anthony says. “They treated me with compassion, but still pushed me to the edge. I can never forget those guys.”

Over time, he embraced a philosophy their program often uses—the Mongoose Style, inspired by a piece of writing from legendary Penn State coach Cael Sanderson. In that metaphor, the world is full of snakes. The mongoose survives not because it avoids danger, but because it welcomes the fight. “We keep going at them,” Anthony says. “No matter what wall we hit, we climb. That’s the beauty of wrestling.”

It’s no surprise then that his goals are bold. This year, at 165 pounds again, he wants to qualify for state and climb the podium—ideally to the top. “I know I have the ability,” he says. He speaks it calmly, not as a boast but as a commitment to the people who shaped him: “I want to show my coaches our way works. I want to light a spark in my teammates like people did for me.”

Amayah has her eyes set on state as well. She wrestles at 135, and she’s done with half-measures: “I want to make it further than I have. If I qualify, I want to get on the podium.” The girls' state tournament is still relatively young, now held in Bloomington, but the fire is the same. She’s ready.

Wrestling also shapes futures beyond the mat. Anthony, who dreams of mechanical engineering, wants to design mechanisms that reduce fatigue for factory workers like his parents—not to replace people with machines, but to preserve dignity and make hard labor sustainable. MIT is on his radar. So is the idea of improving the world in concrete, human ways. Amayah isn’t sure yet what her future holds, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise. She’s thought about the Navy. She’s thought about leaving space for life to show her something unexpected. She has another year. She’ll figure it out.

What they share, though, is a sense of belonging. That belonging has only deepened this year with the opening of the program’s long-awaited wrestling facility—an airy expansion of the Wicall Building that replaces years of balcony workouts and borrowed spaces. “Wrestlers don’t need fancy,” Coach says. “Give us a spot to roll out mats, and we’ll get our work in.” But he admits—the new room gives something more. It signals value. It whispers, You matter. And to athletes like these, it makes a difference.

In that room, on those mats, with those coaches and teammates, two young wrestlers continue to sharpen themselves into the adults they’re becoming. They are part of a lineage—fighting forward, climbing walls, passing down the mindset that shaped them.

And as any mongoose would tell you: the best fights are the ones you finish.