I hope everyone enjoys their holiday season and has a wonderful new year! If you’re on the mat, working hard, or just lazing around, Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays from WrestlingPod.

An excerpt from a column in SportsFan magazine

There was a state championship high school wrestling match in New York where one of the wrestlers won by a score of 7-6. Before the official raising of the hand by the referee, he took off his headgear and tossed it into the air. The referee raised his hand and declared him the winner. I think you can see where this is headed.

After the official declaration of the end of the match, the referee was notified that the headgear had been tossed and that is “unsportsmanlike conduct” and that requires a 2-point penalty. You can see where this is headed, right? The referee assessed the penalty and awarded the match to the guy who had previously been declared the loser.

Obviously, the initial winner appealed the imposition of the penalty; the grievance committee - or whatever it is called - denied the appeal. The initial winner went to court to overturn the penalty and be reinstated as the winner. The judge in the case refused to intervene and said that if he did intervene it would make every judgment call by every referee the subject of potential litigation and that was not something appropriate “from the distant ivory tower of a judge’s chambers.” Hooray for that judge!

By TODD HOLCOMB
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Caleb Anthony and Dustin Harvey have gone shark fishing off the Florida coast and snowboarding in North Carolina.

Next year, they’ll be college roommates and teammates on the wrestling team at Newberry College in South Carolina. They’ve talked about getting matching tattoos, but one of their mothers won’t let them.

Now, something these high school seniors have never done together — but dreaded for years — could be at hand.

Anthony, the reigning Class AAAAA champion at 145 pounds from Pope High in Marietta, and Harvey, the state runner-up at 152 from South Cobb in Austell, might be facing each other as wrestlers in a high school match for the first time.

The Cobb County Championships are Thursday and Friday at Lassiter, and at stake is a title that each covets but has never won.

“My stomach is just nauseous thinking about it,” said Tara Manion, Harvey’s mother. “Caleb is literally like my other son. It will be tough to watch.”

Nonetheless, Manion will bring a camcorder, her husband, Chad, and perhaps even her own parents, Bill and Beverly Gwynn, so they can savor the moment.

By Tim Masmar
STAFF WRITER

BURLINGTON CENTRAL — Burlington Central’s Ricky Leos still thinks about the bizarre set of circumstances that swiftly unfolded and wiped out a memorable junior season on the wrestling mats nearly one year ago.

How could he not?

Leos was among six wrestlers initially suspended in February when a seemingly ordinary case of “goofing around” at the school got way out of hand and ultimately led to him being banned from the state tournament.

The fighting-related incident happened just days before the team — in the midst of its best season ever — was to compete at the Plano Sectional.

In disagreement with the school district’s ruling, Leos and another teammate decided to contact lawyers and fight the disciplinary action levied against them. Leos took it upon himself to seek out legal advice by driving to St. Charles. He finally stumbled upon attorney Scott Sheen, who happened to be a former wrestler himself. Shortly thereafter, a Kane County judge granted both students temporary restraining orders against the suspensions so they could wrestle at sectionals.

Scott Casber/Takedown Radio

Takedown Radio Upcoming Schedule:

December 24 — No Show, off for the holiday
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December 29-30 — TDR will come to you live from the 44th annual Midlands Tournament at Northwestern University

This year’s broadcast team includes: Scott Casber, Steve Foster, Greg Zafros, and Nick Passolano

Broadcast schedules TBD with a start at approx. 10:00 AM CST time each of the two days.
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December 31 — No Show, off for the holiday

Next we head to the East Coast for some very special LIVE broadcasts

January 2 — SHOW # 1 2-4 PM Eastern Live from Columbia’s Wrestling Room with head coach Brendan Buckley and his squad
Great opportunity for us to go one-on-one with some of the guys

Tom Franck, Staff Writer
tom@revwrestling.com

The team race in folkstyle wrestling tournaments is an exciting and important aspect of the sport. While the competition within each weight class is thrilling by itself, one wrestler alone can’t win a team title (at least I’ve never heard of that happening). A school must do as best they can in as many weights as they can to bring home the championship.

A tournament team race begins as a slow-moving monster. The early rounds are long and points are added in small bits at a time. As the rounds get shorter, the points start coming faster and increase in amount. The totals can be difficult to follow. Most of the time, fans, wrestlers, and coaches wait for the announcers inform them of the scores.

Point structures for college wrestling tournaments have not been devised without great thought. Rule-makers have meditated deeply and changes in points over the years have been sound: both in promoting excitement and striving for fairness. This is not something that folkstyle wrestling fans should take for granted. To see how sensible the NCAA race is, one must merely study the team point scoring system employed by FILA for the Worlds, which seems to get increasingly silly with each subsequent change.

INDIANAPOLIS - First-year data from the NCAA’s new Graduation Success Rate show that about three-fourths of Division I student-athletes are succeeding in the classroom and earning their college degrees.

The GSR is a new NCAA measurement that improves the federally mandated graduation-rate by including transfer data in the calculation. It was developed in response to college and university presidents who wanted graduation data that more accurately reflect the mobility among students in today’s higher education climate.
Research indicates that complex patterns of college attendance are becoming the norm for U.S. college students — it is estimated that about 60 percent of all new bachelor’s degree recipients are attending more than one undergraduate institution during their collegiate careers.

Overall first-year GSR results indicate that after removing students who leave institutions while academically eligible, about three-fourths of all Division I scholarship student-athletes graduate either from the institution they started at or where they transferred.

“This is an important finding, one that I believe reflects that fact that by and large, athletics departments are successful at keeping student-athletes on track to graduate, either at their institution or another one,” said NCAA President Myles Brand.

Coach’s son earns early win

By Mark Schmetzer
Enquirer contributor

Moeller wrestling coach Jeff Gaier knows exactly what he’d say if his eighth-grade, soccer-playing daughter, Samantha, came to him and asked him if she could take a turn on the mats.

“I’d say no,” he said with a smile. “I think it’s great that girls are wrestling now, but one or two wrestlers in the family is enough.”

Gaier already is tiptoeing through the parenting minefield of coaching his older son, Dean, a 160-pound Crusaders junior. Dean, who finished fourth in the state at 145 pounds last season, moved into the second round of the Southwest Ohio Wrestling Coaches Association Classic Friday at Oak Hills High School with a 15-0 technical fall win over Anderson sophomore Erik Hermanns.

Jeff Gaier’s father wasn’t involved in wrestling, and the 46- year-old coach didn’t put pressure on Dean to take up the sport.

“I played every sport growing up - baseball, soccer, basketball,” Dean said. “In about the fifth grade, I started focusing on football and wrestling.”

Said Jeff: “I was so busy with the high school (wrestlers) that it was the youth coaches who really developed him. I’m just glad he was still interested when he got to high school.”

For most elite wrestlers, the challenge of working their life (school, family, job etc…) into their wrestling career is a daily struggle. Wrestling is priority #1 and everything else tends to suffer. Typically, when a wrestler is done competing, they have to make up for lost time in the so-called real world. The choice of deferring their career path in order to fulfill their dream of becoming an Olympic champion has set them back. This turns out to be a struggle equal if not greater than their challenges on the mat.

Ryan Tobin was exactly opposite.

“I had straight A’s throughout high school,” said Ryan. “The question wasn’t “if” I was going to college it was “where.” I don’t know if school necessarily came easy for me or my grades reflected the amount of hard work I put into my studies. I always rose to the challenge when it came to my schoolwork and athletics; I wanted to distinguish myself as a student-athlete.”

“I was a late bloomer as far as wrestling was concerned,” said Ryan. “I didn’t have programs recruiting me out of high school and that was fine. My choice in the college I went to was not solely about wrestling. It was about planning for my future; where could I have the best opportunity for life.”

By RODERICK BOONE
THE JOURNAL NEWS

Former North Rockland wrestler C.J. Rodriguez learned yesterday that a New York State Supreme Court judge denied a request to overturn the controversial decision that stripped him of the Division I 135-pound wrestling championship at the state meet March 5.

Rodriguez, then a senior at North Rockland, was in the midst of celebrating what many thought was a 7-6 victory over Paul Florio of Section 2’s LaSalle, when assistant mat referee Tom Fauvell informed head referee Tom Lynch that he was giving Rodriguez a two-point penalty for tossing his headgear. That deduction gave Florio an 8-7 victory.

The appeal was filed by the North Rockland school district soon after Nina Van Erk, the executive director of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, denied the district’s request for an appeal on March 13.

“When I found out about a half hour ago I was like, ‘(Darn)’ ” Rodriguez, a freshman at Cortland, said yesterday. “Even the (head) referee said he was sorry. But to tell you the truth, it’s not bothering me much. They did all that stuff, but I know, the kid knows, the ref knows, the 10,000 people there that night know. There is nothing I can do about it now that it’s in writing.”