Wrestling: Tigers remain on track after win

After opening its dual season in early December with a pair of victories, the wrestling team struggled this past Saturday in a quad meet held in Binghamton, N.Y., going 1-2 on the weekend.

Princeton (3-3 overall) won a decisive 31-10 victory over the Merchant Marine Academy but fell to Liberty University and Binghamton in what head coach Chris Ayres described as one of the team’s less successful outings.

“Overall, I felt as if we underperformed,” Ayres said in an e-mail. “We got at least one good performance from just about every wrestler in the duals this weekend; the problem was that we were not consistent across all duals. So a wrestler might wrestle great in one match, but not great in the next. There are 10 weight classes [and] seven minutes [per] match, so there are 70 minutes of wrestling in a given dual. I felt we were wrestling hard for about 40 minutes in each dual.”

Through the Tigers’ performance did not measure up to their high expectations, there was much to indicate that the team could be competitive in the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association.

The team’s freshmen, undoubtedly the best recruiting class of Ayres’ four-year tenure, once again turned in solid victories, with 125-pounder Garrett Frey, 133-pounder Zachary Bintliff and 141-pounder Luis Ramos all wrestling well.

Standout Frey went 3-0 for the weekend, while Bintliff put up 10 unanswered points in his match against Liberty to come back from a 4-0 deficit. Ramos, who dislocated his shoulder earlier in the year, pinned a wrestler who had defeated him only three weeks earlier.

This year’s team is certainly young — there are only four upperclassmen on Princeton’s roster — but the older wrestlers have proven reliable. Senior 157-pounder Danny Scotton toughed out a win against Binghamton, while junior 165-pounder Travis Erdman defeated his opponent from the Merchant Marine Academy in the final seconds of the bout.

To Ayres, the most important lesson of the weekend was that a higher level of focus is required for the team to be successful in the future.

“If every wrestler wrestles hard for every second of every match and we put in a good 70 minutes, good things will happen, and we can beat a lot of teams,” Ayres said. “On the other hand, if we only put in 40 [good] minutes or so, we will not beat a lot of teams. With 70 good minutes, we would have went 3-0 this weekend.”

Ramos echoed Ayres’ remarks, saying that if the team could maintain a strong level of intensity, it would be able to utilize its significant talent and achieve some positive results throughout the season.

“There were some guys who were able to turn the corner this weekend and really step up the intensity in their matches,” Ramos said. “They picked up their level in practice and it showed in their matches. I feel like if everyone consistently wrestles with that degree of energy and focus, we will be able to go really far.”

The Tigers’ capacity to wrestle well for 70 minutes will certainly be tested as they attempt to close out the calendar year. The team travels to Lewisburg, Pa., next week to take on Bucknell (3-3), Drexel (3-3) and East Stroudsburg (0-3) in what is sure to be another competitive — albeit winnable — quad meet.

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Ayres has made clear that his primary goal is to have some wrestlers qualify for the NCAA tournament in 2010. At the same time, he said, it is the ambition and drive of each member of the team — rather than anything that he can say or do as a coach — that will determine whether the Tigers will have a productive season.

“My expectations don’t matter,” Ayres said. “It is the expectations that each individual of this team has for himself and for his teammates that will determine how we do in the latter half of the season. If each individual has the expectation that they will go out and wrestle hard for seven minutes without fear or inhibitions, then great things will happen for the 2009-10 Princeton wrestling team.”