PALMER — Two-a-days. Sweat. Practice field grass. Putting on the helmet and pads. Hanging out with this high school football buddies.

Nick Stahler missed it all.

“I missed that smell, and football’s not a good smell,” Stahler, a Palmer wrestling standout said after manhandling his way to a quarterfinal win by technical fall during the Lancer Smith Memorial wrestling tournament on Friday.

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That’s how much he missed playing football.

But Stahler, a Palmer High School senior and three-year member of the Moose football squad, was forced to make the tough choice, picking once sport he loves over another. Stahler opted to forgo his senior season of football simply because he can now smell the chance of landing a college wrestling scholarship.

“I love football, but it came down to what I wanted to do in college,” Stahler said. “I thought I could do a lot better (in wrestling). My body’s more suited.”

Stahler is just one of an ever-growing number of Alaska high school multi-sport athletes who have had to choose between football and wrestling. But unfortunately for the sport of wrestling in the 49th state, more have opted for the gridiron rather than the mat.

“There’s a lot of 4A kids who want to play football then wrestle,” Stahler said, referring to student-athletes in the Alaska large-schools class.

But in Alaska, the prep wrestling season starts before the football season even ends, giving the wrestlers-turned football players problems.

The issue is only due to a recent change in the Alaska Schools Activities Association master schedule, and some programs have suffered as a result. Palmer is one of those programs that has been effected as of late, losing a number of athletes to a football program that is a perennial postseason team.

“It’s the ongoing saga of the wrestling season being right on top of football,” Palmer head coach Dale Ewart said.

As a junior, Stahler was on a Palmer football squad that advanced to the state championship game. Although he had the chance to play for a state title in one sport, but missed the first three tournaments of a wrestling season that is only about nine weeks long.

“If the season was longer it wouldn’t be quite as big of a deal,”  Stahler said.

Moving right from football into the middle of wrestling season also puts added wear on the body, Stahler said. Plus the transition between the two sports can be tough for wrestlers when settling into a weight class. Generally athletes bulk up for the football season and slim down for wrestling.

“Most wrestlers, it takes about two and a half weeks to get down to their optimum weight level,” Stahler said.

If these factors cause student-athletes to chose one sport over another, football normally comes out as the winner.

But Stahler is the exception to the rule.

Rather than putting on the helmet and pads for his senior season, Stahler stayed on the mat, wrestled throughout the summer and even made his way to meets in the Lower 48.

Now he’s hoping that extra work pays off with a state title and a college scholarship.

“I’m definitely looking for that,” he said.

Stahler finished third in the state tournament as a sophomore and a junior, and is a defending Northern Lights Conference champion.

This year he’s one of the top wrestlers in the 140-pound class.

Following the high school season, Stahler will head south to compete in the Reno Tournament of Champions, an annual event known as one of the top high school tournaments in the western United States.

Last year, Stahler came within one match of placing at the meet, losing his final match of the tournament by just a point. This year, he hopes to place and catch the eye of college scouts.

“Judging on last year, I’m pretty confident I’ll go down there and do pretty good,” Stahler said. “Hopefully come back with something as far as scholarship offers.”

Stahler has already received interest from a few schools, including Western State, a Colorado Division II program that has contacted the Palmer High senior regularly.

“We’ll see how Reno turns out,” Stahler said. “(Western State’s) looking pretty good. I like it a lot.”

Skipping his senior season of football — a sport that he has played nearly all of his life — could be one of the tougher choices Stahler has had to make, but if Stahler finds himself on a college wrestling squad next season, he’ll know he made the right call.

Contact Frontiersman sports editor Jeremiah Bartz at sports@frontiersman.com.