Brad Boorstin has kept his school calendar occupied with athletics. The Palisades High sophomore plays football in the fall and wrestles in the spring, and has excelled at both. The MVP of PaliHi’s junior varsity football team his freshman year as a running back and linebacker, Boorstin began wrestling with the JV last winter and won six matches before being moved up to varsity. Playing two sports, especially football and wrestling, can take its toll on a body, but Boorstin remains unfazed. Instead, he has chosen to take lessons from each sport and apply them to the other. ’I think wrestling is a little more pressure because it’s just you and the other person, and I kind of like that,’ Boorstin said. ‘Football is more of a team sport, which is fun too because you’re all together. They’re different, but I love them both. '[What translates between the two sports] is tackling, mostly,’ he added. ‘I play linebacker, so I make the tackles, and wrestling helps with that.’ Boorstin also plays running back, which is his position of preference. This past season, he was the JV team’s leading rusher as the Dolphins went 8-2 under head coach Tony Ryan. Standing 5’10’, 150 pounds, Boorstin is 17-7 in wrestling in the 145-pound weight class a year after going 16-11 for varsity. His head coach, Randy Aguirre, said that it is Boorstin’s intelligence that gives him an edge over the competition. ’He’s a smart wrestler,’ Aguirre said. ‘He makes good decisions on the mat. He listens very well. Everything I say, he does. That’s what makes him very coachable. He trusts me, and he’s comfortable with whatever I say. He goes along with it and usually has a lot of success with it.’ Boorstin, who lives in Santa Monica and drives to school every day, began wrestling at Lincoln Middle School after trying out for the team there before transferring to Paul Revere midway through eighth grade. His interest in the sport was his own, though his father has always enjoyed watching wrestling and his uncle wrestled. ’I feel like I’m pretty strong for my weight class,’ Boorstin said. ‘I have good technique, and the moves I know I do pretty well and I learn them pretty fast. I’ve gotten some injuries over the years, but I don’t let them hold me back that much. I just push through them and keep competing.’ As the Dolphins are a relatively young team, Boorstin is being counted on to be one of the team leaders, even as an underclassman. Aguirre believes Boorstin is well-equipped to handle that role. ’The [other wrestlers] definitely look up to him,’ Aguirre said. ‘I think at tournaments he really sets the tone, and kids get behind him and support him. Some of our kids’ goals are to be like Brad Boorstin. He’s a straight-A student. The sky’s the limit for him.’ Next fall figures to be something of a challenge for Boorstin as moves up to the varsity football team, where he will have to compete for playing time on both sides of the ball. Still, the challenges that lie ahead do not phase him. ’Last year I pretty much had my spot the whole year,’ Boorstin said. ‘But I earned it. Going up to varsity is like starting over. I’m looking forward to basically competing for my spot again.’ Competition is something that drives Boorstin, sometimes to a fault, but he is always able to take something out of it. ’I hate losing, especially when I know it was a stupid mistake,’ Boorstin said. ‘But I learn from all of my losses. It makes me better. In the moment I get really mad, but I get over it.’ Boorstin’s father, Steve, is a businessman and his older brother attends Western University’s veterinary school. His older sister, Stephanie, is a shortstop on the junior varsity softball team at PaliHi.
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