After Ema Durst lost in the championship match of the DeKalb Sectional, she said her mindset changed for the better.

The Sycamore junior 140-pounder was no longer thinking about protecting her undefeated record. She was worried about her larger goal of winning a Class 2A state championship.

“The initial feeling was very disruptive and not what I wanted,” Durst said. “Nobody wants to lose, truly. But I think that loss couldn’t have come at a better time. I think I had more of a ‘I had to protect my record’ mindset than just wanting to get on the mat and performing the best I could.”

Durst said the loss humbled her and enabled her to follow through on her goal. She wrapped up the season with a 35-1 record season and a pin in the championship match of the state tournament to secure the first state championship for the Sycamore girls wrestling program and Durst’s second career medal.

She was also named the Daily Chronicle 2026 Girls Wrestler of the Year.

Durst started wrestling as a freshman, brought into the sport by Jasmine Enriquez, a fellow Sycamore state qualifier who took sixth at state this year. Durst became the third wrestler, boys or girls, to win a state title for the Spartans.

In the championship match, Isabella Miller of Oak Park-River Forest took down Durst in the first 20 seconds, but it took her just 30 seconds to get a reversal.

With 10 seconds left in the first period, she had a pin and the state championship.

Durst had spent most of her life as a softball player, a sport she gave up this season to focus on wrestling. She said in softball, there are hours to overcome a single mistake.

“With a wrestling match, you only have six minutes out there,” Durst said. “You have to perform short and you have to perform well. So I’m down early, I have quite a bit of time, but in the back of my head it’s single-digit minutes. It’s a couple seconds.”

Durst said the whole season was built toward her going 4-0 at the state tournament, which she accomplished. She said she wasn’t shocked at how the season turned out given how much preparation she put into it.

Sycamore coach Randy Culton said that work started the day after softball season ended in June and pretty much never let up.

“Right when the softball season ended when they lost to Crystal Lake Central, the next day she was in the gym getting ready and trying to qualify for Fargo,” Culton said. “She goes in there and she qualifies.”

The way women’s wrestling is currently set up, college level is freestyle while high school is folkstyle. That makes offseason work all the more important, and is one of the main reasons Durst ended up walking away from softball as she pursues a collegiate career in wrestling.

She said it wasn’t an easy decision. Durst was a Daily Chronicle All-Area First Team third baseman last year. She hit .456 for the Spartans, the fourth highest in program history. Her sister Tia Durst is playing for Washington and a former Daily Chronicle Player of the Year.

But the hard part, she said, had to do with coach Jill Carpenter and her teammates.

“It was less about the sport itself than having to let go of that softball community coach Carp has made,” Durst said. “She has such a great community she has kept for so many years and I do truly miss not only playing the sport but messing around with the group of girls that are there. I will always hold Sycamore softball in my heart very dearly due to the community and the friendships I was able to make.”

Carpenter has been the head coach at Sycamore for 20 years. The girls’ wrestling team at Sycamore has existed as its own entity for two.

But the numbers have been rising, and Durst said it’s been fun watching this community grow from the ground up.

“It’s just really exciting to have more people to bond over the sport with,” Durst said. “Obviously the genuine wrestling and actually doing the sport is part of it, but at the end of the day these are just people I want to hang around with and we all enjoy doing the same sport. It’s exciting to watch the community grow and talk to more people I may not have been able to talk to before.”

The Spartans had about five wrestlers at most tournaments and ended up with three state qualifiers - Durst, Enriquez and Frankie McMurtry. They still placed high as a team at most tournaments, and Durst is optimistic their numbers will grow next year.

Interstate 8 rival Kaneland and local rival DeKalb both have close to full lineups in their programs. Durst said she’s hopeful Sycamore gets there soon.

Enriquez is a big part of that, not only bringing Durst on board but also most of the other Sycamore girls’ wrestlers.

“She is just a chatty person, in a positive way. She’s a motivator,” Culton said. “When she talked with Ema, she was like ‘Yeah, sure I’ll give it a try.’ ... And it was purely Jasmine’s doing.”

Durst said she’s not the best recruiter but Enriquez is a natural. She’s good at persuading people to join wrestling, and she supports both the boys and girls programs.

Durst said Enriquez knew exactly how to pitch wrestling to her.

“I had always been a pretty aggressive kid, and me and Jasmine have always been in the same school building all throughout elementary, middle and high school,” Durst said. “She knew me pretty well and she knew how aggressive I was. She was like, ‘Hey, just try it out, come to a practice or two.’”

And Durst didn’t listen. At first, anyway. It took her about two weeks, after the season was already underway, before she showed up to practice.

But she showed up, thanks to Enriquez.

So what got Durst to stick around in the end?

“It was so much fun being able to beat people up jokingly, kinda,” Durst said.