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Regional champion McKee fights through pain to make state
BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS
Sports Editor, RTC
Rochester sophomore Makenna McKee did not bring shoes with her to school for the wrestling regional at the RHS gym last week.
So when it started to snow outside while the tournament was happening inside, she had to hop on her mother’s shoulders for a piggyback ride to the parking lot for the car ride home.
She beamed all the way. But earlier, she said she bore the figurative weight of the world on her shoulders.
McKee overpowered the competition at her home regional, going 4-0 on the day to win the regional title and improve to 25-7 on the season. She is the first regional champion in school history since the IHSAA sanctioned the sport last April.
Ranked No. 9 according to IndianaMat.com, she advanced to her second straight state finals and will take on Franklin Central freshman Alia Russell in the first round at 10 a.m. today at Corteva Coliseum in Indianapolis.
McKee began her regional by pinning Kokomo’s Makyila Rubush in 2:43. In her ticket match, she upset West Lafayette’s fourth-ranked freshman Macy Fordyce on a fall in 2:00. She then dominated Carroll (Fort Wayne)’s Madison Waltz, a wrestler who had pinned her twice during the regular season, by technical fall 16-0 in 5:22.
Then she put away Logansport’s Olivia Gibson on a 14-0 major decision in the final, riding her from the top position when she wasn’t recording two takedowns and two near-falls.
McKee took to counterattacking against Gibson. That went against McKee’s aggressive nature.
“I will say I’m not the greatest at sprawling and stuff, but it seemed to work on her,” McKee said.
It might have looked easy, but McKee said it was anything but.
“It was so rough,” an emotional McKee said. “I had to fight through all four of my matches, and I’ve never really went through all of that, and my muscles were stinging on my tech fall. … My muscles were so sore, and they were just burning. And now I don’t feel good right now, but I fought through it, but it was rough. It was probably the best I wrestled though too.”
McKee said she changed her eating habits prior to the regional. One week earlier, she decided not to eat the day before the sectional at Columbia City. Then after weighing in, she would chow down.
She said she did this without consulting the coaches, and she said she regretted it.
This time, she ate the day before, and she said she felt stronger.
“Last week, I didn’t eat for the last two nights, so I had no fuel in my body,” McKee said. “This week, I planned all my meals, and I did it correctly, and then I had energy for today.”
Rochester coach Tristan Wilson said he and the rest of the coaching staff did not find out that she did not eat the day before the sectional until after the sectional.
“She thought if she ate right after weigh-ins that she would feel good, but everyone who has ever done that knows you feel terrible,” Wilson said. “So instead of just trying to get the last bit of weight off the last second, she managed her weight well the entire week, which helped fuel her. … That’s a big reason why she did what she did today.”
McKee just started wrestling competitively last year, and she has already made state twice. She lost in the first round at state last year when it was held at Kokomo High School and under the auspices of Indiana High School Girls Wrestling.
“A lot of it is mental,” McKee said when asked how she has improved since last year. “Obviously, a lot of it is physical too, but mental is really what gets you in the second and third period, but I think I’m a better wrestler because I put in so much work, and I always push myself.”
Wilson calls wrestling “90 percent mental” and said it applies to McKee. He said McKee is both well-conditioned and hates to lose.
“She believed that she could go three periods, so she went three periods,” McKee said. “There’s a lot of kids like that.”
McKee said her brother Gavin, a 2023 Rochester grad and a former semistate qualifier, is a frequent practice partner.
“He’d teach me stuff I didn’t even know existed, which today, it worked,” McKee said.
