Brad Carls, who will wrestle in the Southern Regional on Dec. 4, has been through a lot during his time at Bakersfield College, including a near-fatal car accident.
Carls was driving his Volkswagen bug on Truxtun Avenue in October 2009 when a car tried to beat the traffic on a left turn into Houchin Community Blood Bank.
Carls t-boned the car and suffered multiple injuries, ending his season – a season in which he was ranked No. 1 in the state. “At the time I was in the best shape of my life, I mean, I went chest first into a steering wheel at 55 [mph] and literally bent the steering wheel,” he said. “Physically speaking, man, I was a machine.”
Carls suffered injuries all over his body, including damage to his knees. Carls said that he never had problems with his legs before the accident but has since had nagging pains, especially while wrestling.
“There is one practice where I was having a really hard time, and my knees were bothering me,” said Carls. “Mentally I was stressed, I was already like, ‘Why am I here? This is horrible. Why am I putting myself through this?’ And I hit it – a huge plateau, a huge wall.
“[The coaching staff] kept pushing me. I had two coaches in my ear; one was saying, ‘What are you doing? You’ve got to go. You have to wrestle. You have to push yourself – push yourself,’ and then another coach was saying, ‘Brad, you can never wrestle like that. We’re going to get your year back.’
“I walked out of practice that day, only time I’ve ever walked out of a practice,” he added. “I thought about it all night, but I came back the next day and just kept pushing, and after that I broke through, that was the last major block that I had. After that I kept going.”
The car accident was the second season-ending incident that Carls had to deal with. The first occurred during his freshman year when he came down with multiple infections in his body.
Carls was diagnosed with mononucleosis, or mono, as well as a viral infection and a bacterial infection.
At first Carls thought that he just had a common cold, but it took only two weeks for Carls to really start feeling the seriousness of the illness.
Carls said that he would often be found sleeping in the locker rooms and would regularly sleep between the grueling two-a-day practices that he was still participating in. Carls didn’t see a doctor at first, and it took a demand from his mother to finally get him on an exam table.
“[The doctors] said I had a viral infection in my body that was raising my [white blood cell count], and they, at first, thought that the bacteria was in my heart and thought it was pumping through my body,” he said. “So they checked my heart because they thought it was pumping through it, but my heart showed fine.
“Then they thought it was in my brain, so I went and got a CAT scan, and they said everything looks normal there, so they said that it didn’t work into my heart and it didn’t work into my brain, but it was still pumping through my body.
“I was a little nervous when they were like, ‘We think it’s in your heart,’ but they said, ‘It’s not going to kill you. We know what it is. We’ve got you on antibiotics, and we’re just going to give you what you need to get healthy,'” he said. “I was more worried about getting healthy and coming back, but I was never like, ‘Oh my god, it’s in my heart. I’m going to die.'”
Carls has his own theories about how he attracted the infection, including drinking out of a dirty water fountain after practice that had been used by the men’s basketball team to spit in.
Carls tries not to let his off-the-mat adversities affect how he went into a match.
“You never think about these things when you get into a fight,” Carls said. “And that’s how I look at wrestling. If you go into a fight, the last thing you’re going to think about is, ‘Oh, my pinky toe hurts, or oh this hurts.’ When you go out there, your mind is going to be focused on one thing and one thing only, and that’s winning.”
Carls hasn’t had the best luck in the world but is determined to accomplish his goals.
Some people would think about giving up in Carls’ situation, but he hasn’t.
“Overall, I never thought about stopping wrestling, and I’ll probably wrestle till the day I die,” Carls said. “Every day in itself, when you’re pushing yourself in a sport that takes that much, I don’t care if you’ve been in a car crash, or if you’re perfectly healthy and wrestling every day. If you push yourself the way you’re supposed to push yourself, to be a state champ or to simply be the best you can, you question it every day.
“There’s only one fun part about wrestling, and that’s when the ref raises your hand, and you win.”
Carls holds his coach, Bill Kalivas, in high regard, and gives Kalivas a lot of credit for getting him through his adversities, and helping him become the successful wrestler he is today.
“[Kalivas] is one of those coaches that doesn’t just help you during the season,” he said. “He helps you out year round. If you truly give it your all, he’ll give his all to help you get to where you need to be.”
“I’ve been with [Kalivas] going on three years now, and he knows the right ways to push me, and he knows what I need, and he definitely gets me to where I need to be,” Carls said. “He’s not one of those coaches that is going to beat you up. He understands that you’re human, he understands that you can’t go 100% everyday. He understands peaking, he understands nutrition, he’s just a very smart, well-educated man in the sport of wrestling. So when he says something, obviously you listen.”
During his years here at BC, Carls and his coaches have developed a family-like relationship and is pushed harder by them than the rest of the team.
“[The coaches] hold me to a higher standard. They expect the best from me, and they expect me to give it my all, and if I fall short it bothers them more than if another wrestler did the same thing,” he said. “I’ve been with them a long time, and they want me to win.”
Carls hopes that wrestling will pay for his schooling and plans to move on to a four-year university next fall.
Although Carls considers himself in the 197-pound weight class, he is currently the number-two ranked wrestler in the state in the heavyweight class that tops out at 285.