Maddie Kubicki had the most dominant high school girls career in Missouri.
At Park Hill South High School, she finished with a 158-0 loss and won four consecutive state championships to cap off a perfect career.
The momentum she gained in high school carried over at the college level as she has had a successful three seasons at Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C.
While she isn’t mowing down the competition like she did with the Panthers, she still has made a name for herself at the next level.
She became the first women’s wrestler at the college to earn three All-American honors for the Scotmen, finishing eighth as a freshman and sixth as a sophomore in the National Championship Tournament. This winter, she took fourth at the inaugural NCAA Women’s Wrestling National Championship in the 145-pound division, a tournament that featured teams from Division I to Division III.
“I feel like my season went pretty well, especially just from even just like past stuff with injuries and everything, but being able to just come in, start strong, and just kind of have a good season overall,” Kubicki said. “I’m really hoping to continue that and become a four-time All-American.”
Last March, after winning her first-round match by pin, she fell to No. 1 seed Reese Larramendy in the quarterfinals by tech fall to fall to the consolation bracket. From there, she went 3-1, winning two matches by pin and one by tech fall, including a pins over former Belton wrestler Louise Juitt and former Washington wrestler Annalise Obermark.
Kubicki fell to Simon Frasier’s Liv Weber by fall in the third-place bout and ended with a 23-6 record.
I thought it was just amazing to be a part of the inaugural year for NCAA for women’s wrestling” Kubicki said. “I tried not to get in my head too much, because I’ve wrestled in that arena (Xtream Arena in Coralville, Iowa). I wrestled in that arena when I was younger,
I was trying to have a strong mindset and be like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here before, I’ll be fine. If I ever had any thoughts come up, I’d make adjustments, try not to overthink, just kind of focus on my breath and just uh try and make sure I’m putting myself in the best position to do the best that I can at that tournament.”
She had to fight through a shoulder injury during her freshman season en route to her first All-American honor. She had surgery and got healthy enough to compete in the National Tournament.
She said she had to learn to be more patient and had to focus a lot on proper positioning when adjusting to college-level wrestling. Kubicki noted wrestling in high school was much easier for her as she competed against some opponents who were new to the sport, while she had been wrestling most of her life.
At the college level, things are a lot different, she said, as wrestlers were more passionate about the sport and had just as much if not more experience than Kubicki.
“I definitely feel like a lot of people are stronger and their technique is definitely at a higher level,” Kubicki said. “I like just seeing myself improve throughout the years. My technique and my style changed.
“It’s a lot of small things. I am trying to be a lot more patient and wait for everything to kind of set into place, and know that I have my shot whenever it’s there.”
In the offseason, Kubicki has been training and recently attended a week-long event called the Liuzzi-Journeymen Italian Stallion Wrestling Camp in Scalea, Calabria, Italy. It featured training from elite coaches and wrestlers and gave Kubicki a chance to compete and train with other wrestlers from all around the world.
“It was really good just to be able to get different looks from different people from around the world, and be able to meet new people and kind of just enjoy our time out there,” Kubicki said. “I was able to look at things almost from a different perspective. Some of the techniques they showed, it enlightened us and being like, oh, from like this position, you can hit a leg lace or kind working through positions that people from the U.S. don’t normally do. I feel seeing their view on different positions was really cool.”
And that kind of training could help prepare her to meet some of her big goals going into her senior season.
“The goal is always to try and be a national champion, and I’m going to do anything I can to try and make that happen,” Kubicki said.
