Junior Tyree Owens and sophomore Ares Carpio wrestle during a practice match at the Sun Devil Fitness Center in Tempe. The ASU wrestling team started the season off 2-1 and now heads to Pennsylvania on Friday to wrestle against Bloomsburg. (Photo by Diana Lustig)After a tough opening set of matches, the schedule for the Sun Devil wrestling team doesn’t get any easier.
ASU (2-1) opened the season with a pair of wins over Southern Illinois University Edwardsville 32-3 and Ouachita Baptist University 31-6 before dropping a close contest to No. 8 Illinois 27-11.
Despite the loss, ASU coach Shawn Charles said he was still happy with what he saw from a team that doesn’t have a single senior.
“I feel that we have made a lot of progress from last year to this year,” Charles said. “We just wrestled the No. 8 team in the country, and we won three matches decisively, they won three decisively and then we had four matches where it could have gone either way.”
The closeness of the matches against Illinois gives Charles and the team hope as it moves in to its next dual meet against Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.
However, beating the Huskies will be no small feat. Bloomsburg has four wrestlers ranked in the top 20 in the country according to intermat.com and wrestle with a style that ASU isn’t used to seeing.
“We’re expecting a team that’s going to come out and wrestle hard on their feet, but I think they’re predominantly going to be tough on top,” Charles said. “They’re going to try to ride us, hold us down. That’s East Coast wrestling, a lot of mat wrestling. So, the expectation is they’re going to come out there, get on top of us and wear us down and try to turn us.”
After wrestling Bloomsburg on Friday, the Sun Devils will have little time to rest. On Saturday, ASU will head to the University of Pennsylvania to compete at the Keystone Classic on Sunday.
It will be another chance for the Sun Devils to get some experience competing against East Coast wrestlers, which could pay dividends in the long run.
“It’s a good tournament for us. We get to see a lot of East Coast wrestlers,” Charles said. “East Coast wrestlers wrestle a little differently than Midwest and differently than West Coast, so it’s an opportunity to get that feel for them and getourselves more prepared for our conference and national tournament at the end of March.”
For redshirt junior Kevin Radford, the weekend is a chance to prove how good ASU really is.
“The score for Illinois didn’t show how good of a team we actually are,” Radford said. “If we go out there against Bloomsburg and wrestle hard, get our shots off, we can upset them.”
Reach the reporter at ejsmith7@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @EricSmith_SP
