Wrestling: Frey earns NCAA berth with upsets

Four years without an NCAA qualifier, nine years without a winning season and 23 without a winning record in the Ivy League. Coming into this season, the wrestling team has had to contend with a host of disappointments over the past two decades. As fate would have it, though, this season turned out to be the beginning of a new era.

“There are some basic benchmarks for a program in the rebuilding process, and getting a wrestler to NCAAs is one of the most important,” head coach Chris Ayres said. “Having a winning season is another.”

Check and check. Earlier this season, the Tigers (9-10 overall, 3-2 Ivy League) clinched a winning record in the Ivy League with a victory over Columbia, and last Saturday, freshman Garrett Frey earned himself a place in this year’s NCAA Championships.

Frey had a rough road through the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association (EIWA) Championships last weekend. As the seventh seed, he had to face the second and third seeds in the 125-pound weight class in his first two matches. The first match against second-seeded Joseph Langel of Rutgers had the potential to be an extremely difficult matchup for Frey.

But Frey didn’t flinch, opening the match with two quick takedowns to take a 4-1 lead. Langel managed to escape the first takedown but could not break out of the second, and Frey finished the match by pinning Langel with 2 minutes and 12 seconds left in the first period.

The second match against third-seeded Jasen Borschoff was a rematch of one of Frey’s first collegiate matches. The two had faced off in the finals of the Keystone Classic, where Borschoff won a 5-3 decision after a tough match.

This time, though, Frey managed to take the lead with an early escape. Going into the third with a 4-0 lead, Frey successfully held off Borschoff’s attempted takedowns and managed one of his own, ending the match with a 6-1 victory that guaranteed him a trip to the NCAA Championships in two weeks.

He had the chance to finish his first EIWA Championships on a perfect note with a victory in the finals but fell to the defending NCAA champion, Troy Nickerson of Cornell, in a compelling match that ended with a pin in the closing moments of the final period.

In addition to Frey, junior co-captain Travis Erdman captured seventh place at 174 pounds earlier against a familiar foe in Columbia’s Stephen West. The two had wrestled a tight match that Erdman won earlier in the season, and once more Erdman pulled away in the third period for an 8-5 victory.

Princeton’s last victory this weekend came from senior Danny Scotton, who ended his fantastic senior season on a torrid streak. His run finally came to a close in the quarterfinals against Harvard’s J.P. O’Connor, the nation’s top-ranked wrestler, but before that, Scotton turned in a brilliant performance against Franklin & Marshall’s Matthew Gittleman with a 20-4 technical fall victory.

Despite the incredible success of this season, Ayres said he is not satisfied with the team’s performance.

“This week, we will have individual meetings with each wrestler while the sting of their losses in the EIWAs is fresh,” Ayres explained. “While many would consider this season a success for us, it is taken in the context of the program’s history. We were third in the Ivy, and I want to be first. We had one NCAA qualifier, and we need to have five or more. We need NCAA All-Americans and National Champions.”