With eight freshmen grappling in maroon and gold at the Pac-12 championships Sunday, the most of any team in the tournament, ASU earned a fourth-place finish in Boise, Idaho.
“We can’t be satisfied with fourth,” assistant coach Brian Stith said. “The Pac-12 is a very tight race, but past the first round, we got away from being able to compete for the championship. That’s not really what we wanted to do.”
Leading the charge for the Sun Devils were redshirt junior Levi Cooper, who took runner-up in the heavyweight division, redshirt freshman Nathan Hoffer (141 pounds) and senior Eric Starks (174), who each earned a third-place finish.
The Sun Devils also had fourth-place performances from the redshirt freshmen trio of Dalton Miller (125), Shane McGough (133) and Kevin Radford (184).
Though ASU didn’t walk away with any conference champions this year, the team’s showing at the tournament will most likely suffice in earning Cooper, Hoffer and Starks at-large bids to the NCAA Championships beginning March 15 in St. Louis.
Aside from their likely bids, the Sun Devils are frustrated with their performance at the competition, which Oregon State won.
“We’re better than that,” Cooper said. “We wanted to get more guys to the national tournament. It was a disappointing day.”
Cooper was gunning for a Pac-12 title after coming up short in the tournament last year. The redshirt junior started off with a pair of wins on Sunday before falling 3–0 in the finals to OSU’s Clayton Jack, the top heavyweight wrestler in the nation.
“I can’t do anything about the tournament that just happened,” Cooper said. “I’ve got to get back in the room, fix a few things that I didn’t do right this weekend and try to make a run at a national championship in a few weeks.”
Jack controlled the riding time for most of the finals match, preventing Cooper from utilizing his big-man quickness to score any points.
“I got stuck on the bottom,” Cooper said. “I got reversed in the second round, and I didn’t get up at all in the third round. I wasn’t able to get any offense going because I didn’t get up to my feet.”
However, even Sunday’s loss in the Pac-12 finals couldn’t dampen Cooper’s confidence, as the heavyweight plans to use the defeat as fuel for the NCAAs, just like he did last year.
“I was disappointed with myself after last year’s conference tournament as well,” Cooper said of his third-place finish in 2011. “I was able to use that to have a good three weeks before the national tournament.”
In terms of the squad as a whole, the young Sun Devils now know the massive amount of blood, sweat and sacrifice it takes in order to do well at the conference tournament.
“They had a chance to see what it was like to wrestle in the Pac-12 tournament,” Stith said of the team’s freshmen. “(They saw) how hard guys wrestle to get themselves off to nationals.”
ASU will spend the next few weeks evaluating Sunday’s mistakes as well as getting Cooper, Hoffer and Starks ready to face the high level of competition in St. Louis.
“As a team, we’re going to get better and close the gap between the guys that finished ahead of us and walk home next year with a championship of our own,” Stith said.
Reach the reporter at kjnewma2@asu.edu
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