The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/122487
NCAA tournament: wrestling 125-pound category: Utah Valley's Jade Rauser. Rauser had defeated Boyle in an earlier match this season. Boyle recovered from an early hole by scoring a pair of reversals and a single-leg takedown. Those maneuvers gave him the 10-6 victory. He was not as fortunate in his second match of the day. North Dakota State's Trent Sprenkle jumped all over Boyle from the start, scoring a takedown and two near-fall points. Sprenkle tabulated 1:58 in time advantage to count down to the end. Boyle was happy to earn the first victory, but saw himself lacking in the sec‑ ond match. "It felt good to win that first one, it just showed how much I had improved to beat Jade this time around," he said. "I had lost to him in early December. Trent's a tough kid; he ended up taking fifth place overall at NCAAs. He took me down, turned me and hit me with a four-point-move. I got back into the match, but it was tough with someone with as much experience as him. I was close with him, I wrestled hard, but wasn't able to get it done today." In the 133-pound weight class, Rossi Bruno got a chance to show his stuff on the big stage. The match was with one of the members of Penn State's team, which won the national title. PSU's Jeff Conaway fired the match's opening salvo with an escape and double-leg-takedown. Bruno responded by knotting the score with a reversal and escape in the third. The third period saw Conaway pull away and gain the decision. Bruno was emphatically thrown on his back and pinned at 6:17. Bruno's first match of the day had been a victory over Lehigh's Randy Cruz, 3-1. Redshirt junior 149-pounder Eric Grajales defeated Penn State's Andrew Alton, 8-1, but Grajales' optimism was blown away in his second match, losing 12-0 to Binghamton's Donnie Vinson. Redshirt junior 174-pounder Dan Yates battled hard against Missouri's Todd Parker, but Parker amassed 1:38 in riding time to claim a 6-2 triumph. Fifth-year senior heavyweight Ben Apland competed wire-to-wire with Buck‑ nell wrestler Joe Stolfi. The match was tied at 2-2, but Apland was ridden out of the circle and relinquished two late points for a final score of 6-2, Stolfi. All six of Michigan's qualifiers lost twice on the day in the double-elimination format, which signaled the end of their season. The Maize and Blue finished 33rd out of 72 schools. Looking back on things, head coach Joe McFarland pondered what might have been had things gone U-M's way. "You can never anticipate injuries; that can always take its toll on the season," he lamented. "We had many freshmen in the lineup, too. There were ups and downs. I thought the team did a good job of fighting through those things. "Our young guys got good experience for the future. They [Bruno and Massa] qualified for the NCAAs, Massa got into the quarters. Anytime you fight through injuries, it's going to be really tough to overcome them." — Geoff Chiles