When Abbas Abdulrahman was in eighth grade at Rundlett Middle School, more than one friend told him he should join the wrestling team. They all thought he would like it, and that he could be good at it.
They were right.
“As soon as I started in middle school, I knew it was the sport for me,” Abdulrahman said.
He was right, too.
Now a junior at Concord High, Abdulrahman finished first at this year’s Division I championships at 195 pounds, was second at the Meet of Champions, took fourth in New England and is the Monitor’s Wrestler of the Season.
“He had a great season,” Concord coach Ham Munnell said.
Abdulrahman has some natural talents that are perfect for a wrestler, which is probably what his middle school friends were seeing when they encouraged him to hit the mats. He’s a fluid athlete, especially for his size, with great footwork – which are also the skills that helped him be a starting goalie for the Crimson Tide boys’ soccer team last fall.
He’s a quick study and a hard worker, a combo that has allowed him to learn a variety of moves that he can turn into an array of offensive strategies. It also helped him go from a new wrestler in eighth grade to a D-I runner up as a sophomore at 185 pounds.
He missed out on the New England championships last year because he finished fourth at 182 at the Meet of Champions, where the top three advance. He had a big lead in the third/fourth match at the 2019 MOC, but he couldn’t find a way to close it out. This year, Abdulrahman developed the grit to win those kinds of matches.
“That’s the difference in him this year, he wrestled tough all the time,” Munnell said. “We saw him win some gritty matches this year. It was really neat to see him grow up in that way.”
Abdulrahman didn’t need to get gritty at the D-I championships on Feb. 22 at Londonderry High. He went into the tournament as the No. 1 seed and pinned his three opponents on the way to the title, including Timberlane’s Niko Langlois in the final. Langlois went for a move from the bottom off a restart and Abdulrahman easily caught and countered it, earning the title 1:23 into the first period. Seniors Sam Wagner (106) and Khan Amiri (145) also won D-I titles for Concord, which finished runner-up for the fifth straight season behind Timberlane, which won its 19th D-I title in the last 20 years.
One week later at the Meet of Champions, the Tide took second for the sixth straight year while Timberlane won its 16th consecutive MOC title. Abdulrahman would also have to settle for second at the MOC. He pinned his first two opponents in the first round, but then dropped a 7-1 decision in the finals to the top seed, Pelham’s Conor Maslanek.
Still, that runner-up result at MOC qualified Abdulrahman for the New England championships on March 7 in Methuen, Mass., where his newfound grittiness came into play.
After pinning his first opponent at New Englands, Abdulrahman ran into Darby McLaughlin from Central High in Springfield, Mass. McLaughlin, the Massachusetts champ at 195, had beaten Abdulrahman earlier in the season at a tournament in Lowell, Mass. This time, Abdulrahman came out on top with a 12-9 decision.
“I wanted to win when I wrestled against him in Lowell, but I just wasn’t feeling it, I guess,” Abdulrahman said. “This time, I really wanted to get on that podium, so I just wrestled tough.”
He kept wrestling tough in the semifinals against Sam Wilkins from traditional Vermont power Mount Anthony. The two were locked in a 9-9 tie late in the match when Abdulrahman went for a move, but he was caught by Wilkins, who turned it into a pin with 10 seconds left on the clock.
“That was a great match,” Munnell said. “(Abdulrahman) easily could have been in the finals.”
If he was, he would have faced Pelhamn’s Maslanek again. As it turned out, Wilkins pulled out a 3-2 decision against Maslanek for the New England crown.
Abdulrahman ended up losing to the Connecticut champ in the third/fourth match, but he was one of only five New Hampshire wrestlers to finish in the top four at the tournament.
“He wrestled great,” Munnell said. “By far that was the best I saw him wrestle this season.”
Abdulrahman will likely be one of the favorites to win a New England title next year as a senior, but he’s keeping his goals more generic.
“I just want to get better,” he said.
(Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at tosullivan@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @timosullivan20)