By Brian Finley HN Contributor
Jim Zalesky talks Day One
Q: Frustrating day?
Jim Zalesky: Yeah, I mean it was a frustrating morning, more than anything. There’s a couple matches there where, to me, we didn’t do anything. Like 184, Bradley’s first match, then in the quarterfinals Fields match, he didn’t give himself enough opportunities to win. I guess a lot of matches we went out and didn’t give ourselves enough opportunities to win. We’re in the matches, but you’ve got to try and get a little more offense.
Q: How frustrating is that? You talk about close wins all year, and then here it happens again.
Zalesky: It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating because you’re yelling from the corner, you’re telling them how to wrestle, they tell us that they’re going to wrestle that way. Then they go out, and whether it’s nerves or whatever it is, the just don’t wrestle like we want them to wrestle, like we know the can. Bradley came back and opened up fine the last two matches. For some reason, this morning, he just wasn’t doing that.
Q: You’ve got one guy that really has a lot of confidence, seems to be a swagger, and that’s the guy in the finals. Is there a correlation there?
Zalesky: I think you’ve got to have that swagger and confidence to be in a championship. That’s what keeps you in the championship a lot of times is that confidence. Confidence like that, it just carries over when you’re out there wrestling. He expects to win, that’s important, you’ve got to expect yourself to win, you can’t hope to win.
Q: What happened with Falck and Tsirtsis today?
Zalesky: Falck wrestled a pretty tough kid, (Kyle) Ott in the first round. Second round he kind of got caught in a headlock, got down by 5 and had to play catch up. He was opened up all the time, took advantage of him chasing a bit, and never got back in the match. Kind of got caught in a five point move, then got caught again in a couple situations and never came back. He was out there having effort, but he never got anything going for himself today.
Q: Any positives other than Perry making the finals?
Zalesky: Yeah, I think guys coming back, Bradley coming back, Fields coming back, going for third yet, those things are good to see. To me, they didn’t wrestle well this morning, we got on em this afternoon at the hotel, “you know, you’ve got to pick it up. “Tsirtsis coming back and winning tonight in a big match. Those guys still have a chance to come back and take third, you’ve still got six guys back to take third, one guy in the championship, and one guy going for seventh, you’ve got to get seventh to go to the national tournament.
Q: Did Johnston and Eustice play into the game of their opponents?
Zalesky: I think so, I think Eustice did a little bit, Henning’s hard to wrestle, he cuts corners real well, he doesn’t do a whole lot of leg attacks, but he’s good when you shoot, if you don’t finish right away, he’s pretty good there. We didn’t give ourselves enough opportunities, we had probably five. Against a guy like that, you’ve got to have ten, fifteen, twenty tries to get in there and score, then we got caught in the overtime match with him cutting the corner on us.
Q: Can you think of a day to compare this to as far as the frustration in a tournament like this, when it’s been such a tough day?
Zalesky: There’s been some, you know what I mean, maybe the nationals a couple years ago. You have one of those days where things just weren’t going the way you thought they would, or could, that type of thing.
Q: I know that you were pleased with practice the last few weeks, but they came out here and some of the guys looked like they just wanted the season to be over with, almost. Is that tough to take?
Zalesky: Yeah it’s tough to take. Again, I don’t think anyone wanted the season to be over with, just the way they trained. The guys that got knocked out took it pretty hard. I think it’s one of those things where they’re young, some of the younger guys, it’s hard to tell.
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