Half Moon Bay junior Gabriel Garcia-Procopio.
Half Moon Bay wrestler Gabriel Garcia-Procopio’s 2024-25 season ended with an elimination loss in the Central Coast Section Masters Tournament. That loss came Feb. 22, 2025, in the blood round of the 132-pound bracket.
“That guy, he’s really humble,” HMB coach Emilio Bautista said. “Of course he’s sad. But he was ready to keep on grinding to prepare for next season.”
That he did, as Garcia-Procopio hasn’t lost a match since.
The HMB junior earned his third boys’ wrestling tournament championship Saturday at the 62nd Jim Root Memorial tournament at Prospect High School in Saratoga. Garcia-Procopio navigated the 134s bracket with four wins, improving his record to 18-0 on the season.
After advancing through the first two rounds via tech fall, Garcia-Procopio won his semifinal with a first-round pin of Soledad senior Mustafa Alzuhair. It was the last match Garcia-Procopio wrestled in the tournament, as he was notified an hour prior to the finals his opponent opted to forfeit for medical reasons.
“It’s kind of a bittersweet, because he wanted to wrestle in the final,” Bautista said.
It’s easy to see why Garcia-Procopio — known as “Little G,” after wrestling alongside 2024 Half Moon Bay graduate Gabriel Ober — wants to wrestle. He’s been an unstoppable force this season. He opened the year at HMB’s hometown Invitational Peninsula Wrestling Tournament with a championship at 140s. He wrestled at the same weight class, with the same result, at the Nick Buzolich Classic at Lincoln High School in San Jose.
“That was the biggest highlight,” Bautista said. “Because there was some teams from CCS he was able to beat pretty easily ... teams from CCS he will see at the end of the season.”
Garcia-Procopio is a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu specialist, who trains with Bautista and HMB boys’ wrestling head coach Sam Temko at Raul Castillo Martial Arts in Half Moon Bay. He stayed close to home in the offseason, focusing in Jiu-jitsu instead of wrestling.
Maybe that’s why he is getting his money’s worth in his return to the mat. Saturday, he totaled 37 points through his first two bouts, earning a second-round tech fall over Monache sophomore Zecharia Kaiser in the opener. He followed with a first-round tech fall over Sobrato senior Alexande Duchenko in the quarterfinals.
“That guy was a takedown machine,” Bautista said.
“When you see those tech decisions, it’s because he wanted to stand up and take ’em down, stand up and take ’em down again,” he said.
In the semifinals, Garcia-Procopio locked up with Alzuhair, who he wrestled at the Invitational Peninsula Tournament. The HMB junior worked late into the first round before riding through a takedown and using a power half Nelson to score the pin at the 1:44 mark.
“Yeah, he wants to work,” said Bautista, a HMB graduate who himself wrestled in the Jim Root Memorial, taking second place at 122s in the prestigious tournament as a junior in 2015. “He was able to go to these three tournaments, but he wants to wrestle more.”
Other county placers ...
Menlo-Atherton junior Colin Cheung, second place, 152s; Menlo-Atherton senior Asher Supple, third place, 159s; San Mateo senior Luis Gonzales, fourth place, 140s; Menlo-Atherton junior Jorge Arceo-Lopez, fifth place, 108s; and San Mateo junior Dylan Nagaya, sixth place, 128s.
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