DES MOINES — The West Marshall wrestling team went into the IHSAA State Wrestling Championships with four qualifiers and came away with two medals. While nothing is ever exactly what you hope for, this week should lead to bigger and better things for next year.

The Trojans were represented on the podium Saturday night by juniors Urijah Courter and Jon Gonzalez, who finished fifth and seventh, respectively, in their third trips to state in as many seasons.

And both exacted certain amounts of revenge to achieve those results.

“One, you remind them there’s a year in front of them, and that always helps, and two, it’s really nice to go out on a win,” said West Marshall head coach Stephen Adams. “You look around the whole tournament and there’s tons of other names that do this, and we’ve got to understand that nothing’s ever a given coming down here.

“It’s very cliché of why you wrestle the tournament, but you’ve gotta come prove it and it’s tough.”

Courter’s fifth-place finish at 120 pounds was a long way from what the defending Class 2A state champion wanted, but there’s no doubt it will motivate the Collins native for the future.

“It’s always good to end off in a win,” said Courter. “I’ve ended off on a win in all of the (state) tournaments, and I’ve got another year left, so man I’m gonna really work on it this summer. I’m going to just wrestle.”

Courter, ranked No. 1 by IAwrestle, bounced back from Friday night’s semifinal loss in a rematch of last year’s championship bout to take a commanding his consolation semifinal on Saturday morning at the Casey’s Center in Des Moines. Leading 8-5 over Alburnett’s No. 4 Atlee Dewitt (54-5) with one minute remaining, Courter got caught off-guard by a headlock and throw and was eventually pinned in 5 minutes, 36 seconds, to prevent him from making the absolute best out of Friday’s stinging defeat.

“It was pretty hard in the beginning,” Courter said of dealing with Friday’s semifinal defeat. “Mentally I was pretty sad … I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, but there’s just so many emotions.

“I just thought I might as well do as good as I can now because I’m gonna feel worse if I don’t give it my all, so I just did change some things up, fix what I needed to throughout my last couple of matches and I felt pretty good.”

With one door closed, another opened, and Courter kicked it down.

In the fifth-place bout, Courter drew Burlington-Notre Dame’s Rowan Berndt (43-8), and in a rematch of a district final that dealt Courter his first loss since the 2024 state tournament, the West Marshall junior got his revenge.

Courter (42-3) scored takedowns in the first and third periods and dominated fifth-ranked Berndt for a 7-1 triumph to earn fifth place.

“I got a win that I lost the other weekend, so it felt pretty good,” Courter said of avenging his 7-6 district finals loss to Berndt. “It was very important to me. I knew what I needed to do to get the win, too. I think that it gave me closure in my mind because I knew I should have beaten him the first time.”

Courter closed the season with a 42-3 record that boosted his career mark to 125-5. He was 40-2 as a freshman at Nevada, when he placed third at 106, and he was an undefeated state champion (43-0) in his West Marshall debut last winter.

Now he’s got the opportunity to, as Adams says, “prove it.”

“I’ve been very impressed with his mindset,” Adams said. “You get kind of worried when guys don’t lost often and how they’re going to handle it. It can really mess with some guys and just break them, but I was very impressed.

“Everybody’s gonna need some time in the tunnel, but I’m very pressed with their mindset coming back.”

Gonzalez (43-6) also avenged his 126-pound district finals defeat during Friday’s consolation rounds, but couldn’t collect another of his previous losses as he was relegated to the seventh-place match. Instead of letting it consume him, Gonzalez heard his father’s sound logic and listened.

“I wanted to see what my dad would say because I was really upset and I just wasn’t really thinking straight, and he said ‘you’re going for seventh or eighth place, so what’s the best out of the two?'”

No longer able to match what he had accomplished in his previous trips to state, the seventh-ranked Gonzalez got a big dose of perspective from his dad and used it in a 7-2 victory over Winterset’s No. 8 Judah Gurwell (23-7) in Saturday morning’s seventh-place match.

Gonzalez placed fourth as a freshman at 113 pounds and sixth at 120 as a sophomore, and wasn’t sure how to process his step down the podium stairs after only losing by major decision to the same opponent — Indepedence freshman Adam Carey (54-4) — twice during the state tournament. Gonzalez was 5-2 with two pins, a major decision and two decisions over the three-day event.

“I mean, it sucks,” Gonzalez said. “The first match (against Carey) was bad, but the second match wasn’t too bad. I wish I could go back to it.”

Instead of the time machine, Gonzalez opted for a convincing victory in the seventh-place match to close out his season at 43-6 and improve to 127-18 for his career.

“Losing to the same guy, the best he could do was seventh, and it’s annoying, but it’s the outcome,” Adams said. “You’ve just gotta worry about yourself, worry about your process, and if you don’t feel like you should be wrestling for seventh, then prove it. And [Gonzalez] wrestled a great match. He controlled it from start to finish and that’s what we were hoping to see and that’s what he did.”

This year’s Trojan caravan of four wrestlers for state, including senior Kinnick Geers and junior Ben Buck, made it four years in a row of at least four West Marshall wrestlers getting to state. Two podium finishes marked the fourth year in a row of at least one medalist as well.

“You will spend many nights, many hours thinking about the matches that got away from you, but no matter how much you think about it you can’t change it,” Adams said. “But you can use that as a driving force. You can use that feeling, those memories of those matches to spur you to go for runs, spur you to go for a lift, sign up for another tournament, get to another practice, work on a new technique.

“It’s always about growth, and just because you’re at a lower spot on the podium doesn’t mean you haven’t grown.”