There's a reason the "pains" part is tacked onto the end of "growing pains."
Sometimes they hurt.
"Yeah, a little bit," Helias first-year wrestling coach Jacob Wadley said after the Crusaders dropped a 68-4 decision Friday night to the Warrensburg Tigers at Rackers Fieldhouse. "We didn't think it would be easy."
The Crusaders were coming off splitting a pair of duals Wednesday night, beating Warrenton and losing to Hannibal. But Helias managed to win just one of the 13 contested matches Friday.
"I've coached duals in which we didn't win a match, it's not the end of the world," Wadley said. "We need to remember that half of the team only has four days of practice (due to football) and there's still a language barrier between me and the team.
"They're still learning about what I'm saying when I say it."
Wadley said he was the cause of the poor performance.
"I was not as prepared as I wanted to be and if I'm not 100 percent preparing them, then they're not going to be ready either," he said. "I take this on my shoulders and that's it."
Helias' win came at 145 pounds, where junior Jacob Schulte rolled to a 17-6 major decision.
Schulte dominated from the start, scoring a takedown in the first :15 on his way to a 7-1 lead after one period.
"Jacob is going to be a team leader and he was making a statement with his style in that match," Wadley said. "With his aggressiveness, he was saying that the way we were wrestling wasn't us, this is who we are and how we're going to wrestle.
"That is how our entire team eventually is going to look like."
Helias had just one takedown in the other 12 matches. The Crusaders lost nine times by fall, seven in the first period.
"We know the system we have will be successful because it's been successful at other places," Wadley said. "It's just going to take time. We're going to pick it up and we're going to learn from it."
Helias will have a chance to improve today when the Crusaders host the Kickoff Classic.
"I know there are struggles ahead of us, but I want to see how we react to it," Wadley said. "If we lay down now, that shows the amount of character that we have."
The normal Classic 10-team field will be missing at least two schools today because Farmington and Poplar Bluff will be unable to attend due to the bad weather in southeast Missouri. Action is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m.