Your Questions, Answered.. and NCAA Information

Before we get to the questions.. today is a big day for NCAA information.  Starting at 1pm, the NCAA will release the list of competitors at each weight class.  You can follow along on the NCAA Wrestling Facebook page (link).  Also, this evening at 6:00, NCAA.com will host a selection show.  All first round matchups will be revealed at this time.

Now.. on to the questions.  Coach Beasley answered most of the questions posed to us last week.  

Well I wanted to answer some of the questions that have come up on the blog over the last couple of weeks.  One question that came up was who is the best dressed coach.  For that question, we will be doing a video to discuss and answer that question.  If you have other questions, feel free to leave them below.

For a redshirt, how many opportunities are there to wrestle in a given year?

Redshirts have many opportunities to wrestle during the season. There are several open tournaments that they can go to and for us there are a lot of open tournaments that are within reasonable driving distance.  Open tournaments that we had wrestlers compete in this season were the Buffalo Open, Binghamton Open, Lock Haven Open, Penn State Open, Nassau Open, Millersville Open, New York State Collegiate Tournament, Jamestown Open, Edinboro Open, and National Collegiate Open.  Redshirts should, in my opinion, wrestle at least 20 matches in a season and shoot for thirty or more. I know that Heyman, Grella, Perry, Riggi and Deuel all got over twenty matches in this season.  We will also have our team at the University Nationals to wrestle freestyle.

How is John Paris doing? Can we hope to see him back next year?

John tore his ACL in the first match of the year.  He had surgery in December on it and is currently rehabbing.  He has been running and lifting but is unable to get back on the mat yet.  He will be off the mat till the summer.  We are not going to rush him back as we need him healthy and ready for next season.  We will definitely have him back next season.  He is a big part of the team and as you recall was the CAA Freshman of the Year last season.  He is bigger right now as he has been lifting a lot.  He could wind-up anywhere from 174-184-197 but I would expect him at either 174 or 184 pounds next year.

I get asked by a friend who is also a college ref. who the ref happens to be at the Binghamton matches... I don't know because their name is not announced at the beginning of a match. It would be helpful to let us know who is reffing the evenings match.

I will have the referee announced at matches next year.  We have had a variety of referees this season.  We try to have a lot of different officials throughout the year.  I know we had around a dozen officials at the open tournament and have had probably 6-7 different officials for home dual meets this season.  Also this season, we added a second referee for home matches so there isn't a question of time being up or not, close calls get two different sets of eyes, etc.

How do you scout wrestlers/teams from outside the geographic area? For example Central Michigan and Arizona State.

I would say that I try to scout everyone who we compete against or who is good and we may see at nationals.  I personally watch a ton of wrestling to scout others.  However, I do not like to say much about the opponent to the guys on the team.  I can come up with a game plan or whatnot for our guys but I feel like if I say a lot about the other guy that we will wrestle tight.  For example, if I told Steeley that Matt Snyder was going to cradle a certain way on a certain side on top and that he get a cradle this way on his feet and that he switches to the left on bottom, Steeley may get distracted with watching those things and not wrestle well and wrestle to stop those things.  Where if I give him a game plan to focus on things that I know will work against an opponent or that he needs to be aware of one thing the opponent does, it will benefit him.  I think there are teams that over analyze opponents and their wrestlers are tight in matches because they are to worried about all the things the other guy can do.  Actually scouting is easy as we see most of the teams in the country somewhere or another at a tournament (Reno, Body Bar, Penn State, etc)  or duals (Norhteast Duals, etc).  Moreover, youtube and flowrestling have made it very easy to scout other teams.  You can almost always find at least one match and usually multiple matches of an upper-level division I guy online.  I watch all the matches on the big ten network as well.  I love watching wrestling, so it is a hobby of mine to just watch wrestling, which makes scouting easy.  Also, I have a pretty good memory, so once I scout someone once, I usually remember what they do so it makes scouting them the next year that much easier.