Roy Taking Wrestling Talents to U of M

By Jeff Steers
JTV Sports

(August 29, 2021 8:00 AM) Someone told 2021 Jackson High School graduate Jayson Roy he should start wrestling to improve for football.

The footwork and agility would help the budding lineman.

Somewhere along the line Roy fell in love with the sport of wrestling. 

Roy will take his wrestling talents to the University of Michigan where he hopes to walk on at the Division 1 school.

But it is his academic prowess that brought the state champion wrestler to U of M. Roy earned a full ride academic scholarship at the university. He set foot on the Ann Arbor university for the first time on Thursday.

“I was supposed to tour the campus a number of times, but everything kept getting shut down because of COVID-19,” Roy said. 

COVID-19 seemed to be a constant for Roy the past 18 months. A couple of days after finishing in third place at the Michigan High School Athletic Association Division 1 state individual wrestling finals, everything was shut down.

The football season was paused for three weeks last fall and wrestling for 2020-2021 didn’t start until late February.

But Roy and the Vikings found a way to conquer and advance – the same way he did in the wrestling finals this past spring.

“I had to train by myself in wrestling because nobody else was there,” Roy said. “Eventually I could only wrestle with two wrestling partners.

“If one of them got COVID, it would be all over.”

Jackson used that philosophy – do it for the guy next to you – to improve as the season went along. 

“We would go to matches and teams would be destroyed by COVID,” Roy said. “We would still have 40 wrestlers ready to go.”

But Mother Nature finally caught up to the Vikings as two regional qualifiers tested positive for COVID and had to drop out of the individual tournament.

Roy won a district, regional, and state wrestling title against Josh Terrill of Holt High School – a wrestler he was 6-0 against during his high school career.

“He (Terrill) got better every time, but he must have stepped on the mat thinking he was going to lose,” Roy said. “After I finished third at the state (as a junior) I knew I wasn’t going to lose again.”

And he was correct going 31-0 in 2021 to become the Vikings’ first state champ in more than four decades. 

Roy had considered walking on to the U of M football team but decided to stick to wrestling. He was an all-conference lineman for the Vikings in 2020. 

“Football is one of those sports where you have to rely on others and do what is good for the team,” Roy said. “In wrestling, when you go out on the mat it is just you … you can’t blame anyone else.”

Roy hopes to study computer science and would like to work with intelligence systems.