|
Reversal: Wrestling places fourth |
|
|
|
Thursday, 09 March 2006 |
by ERIK RHYNE
Sports Reporter
The Appalachian State wrestling team landed a fourth place finish at the Southern Conference Tournament last weekend in Lexington, Va.
“As a team, I thought we did pretty good,” wrestler Terreyl Williams said. “We did good compared to the rest of the season.”
In team points, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga won the
conference with 112.5 points. The University of North Carolina at
Greensboro and The Citadel followed with 72 and 63.5 points,
respectively.
ASU followed with 28.5 points, with Virginia Military Institute and Davidson College rounding out the standings.
ASU head coach Paul Mance thought the team would have a stronger showing.
“Going in, we thought we were ready to win,” Mance said. “Things
happened that turned the tables. We could have had second place.”
Mance said the team had negative things happen early in the tournament.
“You’re only as good as you are that day when you wrestle,” he said.
“Sometimes things start to go downhill and it’s pretty hard to stop
that momentum.”
The strongest showings for ASU came from Williams, at 133-pounds, Scott
Ervin at 157-pounds and Lee Roper at 165-pounds. Each finished in
second place for his weight class.
Eric Burns and Josh Carroll finished in third place at 149-pounds and 197-pounds respectively.
Appalachian finished the season with a record of 11-8-1. Even with a winning season, Mance was not pleased with the outcome.
“It wasn’t a good year,” he said. “We had a lot of high expectations at
the beginning of the year and we didn’t do what we expected to do.”
The Mountaineers had trouble with consistency all year. Mance said injuries were a problem.
“Every good kid we had was hurt at one time or another and out for at
least part of our
matches,” Mance said. “I don’t think we had one
starter that wrestled every match.”
Williams said after resting for a couple of weeks, the team will begin preparing for next season.
Many wrestlers will enter freestyle tournaments before practice begins next fall.
The Mountaineers have a majority of this year’s team returning next season.
“We’re losing Eric Burns and [Roper], hopefully people we have there
will step up,” Williams said. “Other than that, we should be all right.
We’ve grown a lot from this year.”
Trackback(0)
 |
Sports 
TrackBack URI for this entry
Show/Hide comments
