Like a lot of top-level athletes, Seckman junior wrestler Kai Orine is almost haunted by the memories of those moments that didn’t go his way.
“I remember everything about every match I lost, but I couldn’t tell you about half of the ones I won, except maybe the big ones,” Orine said.
For Orine, those losses serve as invaluable lessons to help him get where he wants to be.
“They’re almost 100 percent always learning experiences, and I always take them straight to heart,” Orine said. “I’m always bitter about it, but I use them as fuel to the fire to get better and learn from my mistakes. I always go over what I did wrong in a match and what I can do to fix it for the next match if I come into the same situation. I always look at it as a steppingstone to getting better.”
Not that Orine has had many of those learning moments. After going 48-7 and placing third at the Missouri State High School Activities Association Class 4 state championships as a 106-pound freshman, Orine lost just once in 49 matches last year, beating Anthony Pisciotta of Timberland by major decision to capture the Class 4 113-pound state title.
“Some people, when they lose, they fall under and can’t recover,” Seckman head coach Ryan Moyer said, “and there’s other ones who are the champions, and those are the ones who learn more off of their losses, and they use those as driving points, and that’s what he’s done these past two years.”
This season, Orine has one loss, dropping a 6-4 decision to Whitfield’s Mike McAteer, a three-time state titlist, during the championship round of the Ron Sauer Duals at Fox. But Orine came back strong, recently winning the 120-pound during the 40-team Kansas City Stampede Dec. 15-16.
In a field that featured several of the top teams from Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas, Orine won all four of his matches in pool play, three of them by technical fall and one by fall. Orine kept that momentum through the gold championship bracket, winning all four matches, including a 5-0 decision over Sam Latona of Thompson in the finals, and Orine was named the Outstanding Wrestler of the tournament.
“I feel like I did wrestle a dominant tournament,” he said. “I established a championship position, and coming out with (Outstanding Wrestler), I was humbled and honored, but I wasn’t super-surprised, because I did work hard out there.”
He defeated a couple of nationally-ranked competitors in the process, including Latona, but that’s just more of the same for Orine.
“The list goes on and on for him,” Moyer said. “Over the past there years, I believe the list is up to 12 nationally ranked kids. Silver world medalist, Fargo all-Americans, a couple of world team members. At any given time, he can be the man.”
Currently, Orine is the No. 17 ranked 120-pounder by FloWrestling.com, and he’s ranked 12th nationally by InterMat. Not too shabby for the Jaguar Little League product who got his start in wrestling before entering kindergarten as “the little kid with the rattail running around who did crazy stuff on the mat.”
“I was a little freak running around, so it was a good way for me to get some energy out,” Orine said. “The first couple times (competing) were a little rocky, but then eventually I guess I developed a little talent.”
In part, because Orine developed a style that has proven tough for opponents to counter. A style that Orine called “unorthodox . . . in a good way.”
“I have kind of a wild style that is hard to game plan against, so everybody just, they’ve always got to be watching me, because I’m always doing something different,” he said.
“I do have my go-to moves and everything that I do, but I can always hit something from nowhere and you wouldn’t really see it coming. Just the explosiveness in my hips, and I have a lot of athleticism that not a lot of kids have, and I’m always in every match. I never stop.”
It’s that “anything goes” approach combined with his relentless that Moyer said makes Orine a special competitor.
“He doesn’t stop, and it’s hard to wrestle a kid like that,” Moyer said. “He constantly attacks for six minutes straight, and his body moves in such unorthodox, unordinary positions that it is tough to wrestle him. You never know. I’ve had more coaches come up to me and tell me that he does a lot of what you’re not supposed to do but he’s really good at that and that’s how he pins a bunch of people, and he catches a lot of people on their backs.
“He’s one of those guys whom you call a dangerous wrestler because at any point in time, he could be losing by 10 points, but he’s still in the match because he can put someone on their back and pin them at any second, or get in a scramble position and put them on their back. He’s just a dangerous wrestler. He’s always in the match, no matter what.”
History has shown that most likely, Orine’s arm will be the one raised in victory when the match is over.
“My goals are just to keep getting better, establishing my dominance on the mat and let people know that they’re not on the same level as me,” he said. “That’s like my main goal is just to let somebody know that they can’t compete with me at that point, and I want them to know that I am better than them.”