Tough schedule stretch brings OSU wrestlers together
Greg Dickinson
Asst. Sports Editor
When a team wins back-to-back NCAA Championships, it is hard to believe that they could get much closer as a team, but that is exactly was has taken place over the last three weeks for the Oklahoma State wrestling team.
“It brought us together,” said OSU senior Chris Pendleton. “Even the young guys like Nathan (Morgan) and Coleman (Scott) and Clay (Kehrer) and Daniel (Frishkorn), you could tell they were always a little bit hesitant about things on these trips in the beginning. But now they are going through the motions just like everybody else with no hesitation.”
The Cowboys, now 20-0 overall, just finished a grueling stretch of duals that had them wrestling some of the best teams in the country.
Since the National Duals Jan. 22-23, OSU has wrestled 12 duals and only three were in Gallagher-Iba Arena.
Pendleton said it was the toughest stretch of wrestling he has seen in his five years.
“In the five years I’ve been here that was the toughest stretch that I’ve ever gone through, that’s the traveling and the level of competition,” he said. “But it was something that our team needed, we needed to band together and rally around each other. Every week seemed like everywhere we went was the worse situation you could be in. The worse fans, the worse environments, the worse travel, but the coaches did a good job keeping our heads up and helping us fight through it.”
OSU coach John Smith said he wanted to give the Cowboys a tough schedule so he could see where this team was.
“There was a lot of adversity that I wanted to see us go through,” he said.
The Cowboys, over the last month, have wrestled some of the top teams in the country, and they did most of it on the road.
Smith said the busy schedule taught him a lot about his team.
“It’s definitely been a team effort to get through these three weeks,” Smith said. “I don’t want to make it sound like we did something special, but I sure didn’t set it up for us to be wrestling our very best every match. We had to struggle, we had to fight, we had to show some real grit to get through some of those matches and it tells you a little bit about the people that are on this team.”
During the win streak, the Cowboys seem to have had a different person step up for them in every match.
In their last match against No. 4 Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pa. Sunday, two of the Cowboys’ All-Americans, sophomore 165-pounder Johny Hendricks and junior 197-pounder Jake Rosholt, both lost tough matches to ranked opponents.
Those losses meant the Cowboys needed someone to step up and help get the victory, and that is exactly what senior 125-pounder Derek Stevens and freshman 133-pounder Morgan did for the team.
Smith said watching different people step up for the Cowboys is what has made this season fun.
“It’s really been an enjoyable year,” he said. “There have been heroes in every match it seems like and it’s been different people that you aren’t used to.”
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