April 25, 2011
By Estela Go, GoStanford.com
There comes a moment when a sport becomes an identity and when an athlete becomes one with his sport. For NCAA runner-up at 174 pounds Nick Amuchastegui this joining began in a kids' wrestling club where he practiced 3-4 months in a year at only eight years old.
When children his age were still exploring different activities, Amuchastegui committed himself to wrestling - alongside his younger brother, Luke, who joined the program a year later - under the guidance of a high school coach who helped grow these future Stanford athletes.
"[With wrestling] in third grade, my mentality started to change a little bit and I started looking at myself as someone with goals and aspirations," said Amuchastegui, the two-time All-American who is just the second Cardinal wrestler ever to compete in an NCAA final. "I was strong-minded about what I wanted to get done and what I wanted to accomplish."
What drew Amuchastegui to wrestling was its individual essence. On the mat, he relies on himself to do business: what Amuchastegui described as "getting the other guy to the point where he halfway gives up so that you just keep at him, and keep at him.
"Wrestling," Amuchastegui said, "Is one of the sports where if you are willing to try harder than anybody else, putting in more training and wanting to win more than the other person, there is a difference that significantly plays into the outcome of the match."
Such discipline and hark work is not all that surprising for a boy who at nine years old learned how to drive a tractor to help on his family's 25-acre farm. Soon he learned the family business of creating custom hay - the process of cutting and raking hayfields to make hay bales - and did this throughout high school and during academic breaks in college.
In Talent, Ore., a town up against the Siskiyou Mountains in the southern end of the Rogue Valley, Amuchastegui grew up fishing, hunting, and riding around on a motorcycle with a gun on his back. His brother, Luke, did the same. Both of them were best friends in a household run by parents who taught them to be physically and mentally strong.
"My dad used to always tell me what his grandma used to tell him and he would say, `I don't care if you end up being a ditch digger so long as you become the best ditch digger there ever was,'" said Amuchastegui in describing the influence of his father, Frank. "`Dig the deepest, straightest ditches and I'll be the happiest dad in the world.'"
But lessons were not learned all that easily. When Luke was younger, he had pet ducks who swam around in a plastic pond filled with water. He was always told to turn off the hose but one time he left the water on and the pond, as well as the duck droppings, overflowed and ran into the hayfield which was supposed to be kept dry.
"My dad tells him, `You know Luke, I don't know what it's going to take to get this into your head so you need to get into that duck pond,'" said Amuchastegui who found this story exemplifying his father's discipline tactics.
Luke never forgot to turn off the water again.
Janice, their mother, had a different parental style. When they complained about farm work, she would go ahead and drive the tractor as well as haul the hay. Through her example formed the mantra: if mom could do it so could they.
Together Frank and Janice Amuchastegui balanced each other well. While neither graduated from college, they raised their sons to be the type of student-athletes that excel at Stanford. For his third consecutive year, Nick is on the Pac-10 All-Academic first team after earning a 3.98 GPA as a mechanical engineering major. The junior also is the two-time winner of the NCAA Elite 88 Award, which is given to the student-athlete at the championships with the highest GPA.
Stanford, to Amuchastegui, obviously has not all been about wrestling; school has been a huge part too. He will continue to get his master's next year in mechanical engineering with a focus on earth systems and will work -- building electrical components for nuclear weapons -- at Sandia National Labs this summer and after he graduates. But getting to this point in his academic career required a lot of hard work, especially in his transition into Stanford.
"I was spending 35 hours a week on homework or so and wrestling," Amuchastegui said about his freshman year. "I was feeling lonely, busy, and stressed out, but in all honesty it was probably the fastest creative growth that I've had as a person. I was forced to look at my situation and look at myself and figure out if I'm really supposed to be here [at Stanford], then I have no choice but to get through it."
All that he has learned so far at Stanford has been passed down to his younger brother, Luke, who is a freshman on the Cardinal wrestling team considering a major in human biology.
"Nick told me a lot of things about life that are turning out to be true," Luke said. "He's accomplished a lot that I would like to accomplish and he's become a man I would really like to emulate."
Motivation for Amuchastegui comes from the constant challenges before him. To wrestle for more than 10 years and to do so with as much passion as when he first started is achieved by "staying excited and hungry for the sport."
"My ability to do good things in people's lives is less when I begin to become apathetic to things and so most of my inspiration comes from my relationship with God," Amuchastegui said. "I know what I want to do, I know what I want to be and for that reason, I'm going to choose to have the most positive outlook: to walk into practice with a smile, to wrestle hard and to encourage other people to do the same."