One individual champion and six top-4 finishers placed the ASU wrestling team fourth at the Pac-10 Championships.
ASU junior Anthony Robles (125) won his second consecutive Pac-10 title, along with a spot at the 2010 NCAA Wrestling Championships.
“The national champion at 125 is going to be from ASU,” Robles said, according to ASU media relations.
ASU junior Ben Ashmore (133), junior Chris Drouin (141) and sophomore Te Edwards (157) also earned automatic qualifications for the national meet.
Other Sun Devils will have to wait until the remaining conference tournaments are finished to find out if they earned at at-large bid to the NCAA Championships.
Early matches at the Pac-10 Championships saw eight of the 10 Sun Devils advance to the semifinals, but only Robles was able to make it to the finals.
ASU coach Shawn Charles said his team had a tremendous first round and came within a point of the lead.
“When we got to the semifinals, we were wrestling some of the conference’s best wrestlers,” Charles said. “They were close, hard-fought matches. The ‘Ws’ weren’t falling our way.”
Edwards and sophomore Kyle DeBerry (165), two of the seven Sun Devils that fell in the semifinals, were able to claim third place, and Ashmore, sophomore Eric Starks (174) and sophomore Jake Meredith (184) all took fourth.
“Everything they did in the semis was great — it was everything I expected,” Charles said. “It was one of those situations in competition where things just don’t go your way at the end of the match.”
As a team, ASU was able to place one spot ahead of last season’s Pac-10 Championship finish.
Oregon State took the title by two points over defending champion Boise State, 127-125.
Cal Poly finished third with 120, followed by ASU’s 104.5 and Cal State Bakersfield’s 97 to round out the top five.
“The guys truly wrestled the way we’ve been training,” Charles said. “They really got after the competition, they held nothing back and they went out there and laid it all out on the line. It was huge step forward for our program.”
The weekend was full of revenge matches for ASU.
One came from Edwards against the No. 14 wrestler in the country.
He was able to defeat the Oregon State senior Keegan Davis, who he had lost to earlier this season, to punch his ticket to nationals.
All of the Sun Devils finished in the top seven of their respective weight classes.
“I’m really proud of these guys,” Robles said. “We’re still a young team, and we’ve got a new coach this year, but I think we are coming together and finding our sense of who we are.”
Drouin finished in fifth place, sophomore Vicente Varela (149) took sixth, freshman Michael Hawkins (197) took seventh and senior Erik Nye (285) ended up sixth.
Eight of the 10 Sun Devils finished at or better then their tournament seeding.
“We closed a huge gap between ourselves and our goals of being a national championship program this week,” Charles said.
Reach the reporter at nathan.meacham@asu.edu
