April 29, 2015 By Chris Clapper

The UW-Whitewater weightlifting club took second in the 2015 state weightlifting championships for the first time at Milwaukee Barbell on April 18 and 19. Eight athletes competed with four taking first place, three taking fourth place, and one taking seventh. The meets best lifter award went to Josh Ireland of UW-Whitewater.

A typical weightlifting meet consists of two lifts; a snatch and a clean and jerk, which are then recorded and the total weight of the two lifts are taken as the final overall score. You have three attempts to hit the lift and can go up in weight each time if you choose but you may not go down in weight from your first lift.

The state championships were not the only prize at stake last weekend. The National University Championships, the 2015 American Open and the 2015 Junior National Championships all could have been earned with a good showing and UW-Whitewater qualified nine different lifters for these prestigious events.

“This week we had a team score because it was the state championships but usually it’s more of an individual sport because you want to hit those qualifying numbers and be able to go to the more competitive meets,” weightlifting club Vice-President Dan Krause said.

Keng Thao, Andrew Malec and Adam Latella all won first places in their respective weight classes and earned trips to the University National Championships. Latella and Ireland also won trips to the 2015 USA National Championships.

This was the first year the event was held in Milwaukee and the rising popularity of the sport was evident as the number of competitors doubled in size.

“Our sport is vastly growing as far as the number of competitors in the organization,” Ireland said. “For example, at last years state meet we had 60 people, which was the biggest meet ever, but this year we doubled that at 120 competitors and had to cap it off at that because we couldn’t hold anymore people.”

Weight lifting scores are based on a formula known as the Sinclair formula that takes your body weight into account as well as the amount of weight you’ve actually lifted, so the person who simply lifts the heaviest amount of weight is not necessarily the winner of the meet if they also have the heaviest body weight. The key is to lift a heavy weight while keeping your body weight as low as possible. Team scores, however, are calculated upon placement of each individual weight class for the team and UW-Whitewater had lots of high finishers.

“We did really well,” Krause said. “Almost all of our lifters hit personal records for themselves so they had, maybe not perfect days, but they all had really good day.”