Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1526526
4 4 O C T O B E R 2 0 2 4 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M L ooking to defend its 2024 confer- ence and national championships, the Penn State wrestling team now knows who it will face during the Big Ten portion of its 2024-25 dual meet schedule. Head coach Cael Sanderson's team will welcome four league foes to State College while going on the road to face a different quartet of teams. The home matches will be against Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State and Maryland; the road trips will be to Nebraska, Illinois, Ohio State and Rutgers. Dates and times had yet to be an- nounced as of early September. Simi- larly, Penn State had not yet unveiled its nonconference schedule or noted any tournaments it plans to attend. Unlike many of their fellow Penn State varsity teams, the wrestlers will not be making any West Coast road trips now that the Big Ten has added former Pac-12 schools USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington to its ranks. That's be- cause none of those schools have varsity wrestling programs. Penn State is expected to hold one of its upcoming Big Ten dual meets at the Bryce Jordan Center, and Iowa is the logical choice as the opponent for that match. However, as we saw a year ago when the Nittany Lions brought Rutgers to the BJC on a Monday night, there is no guarantee that the best home opponent will end up in the larger venue. Sched- uling constraints sometimes come into play, which Sanderson noted last season prior to the matchup with the Scarlet Knights. "What happened is that by the time the schedule came out, some of those larger duals just weren't available," he said. "Nebraska was THON [week- end], and the other one had a career fair scheduled for the Jordan Center. "We just said, 'All right, Rutgers al- ways has a great team. They always com- pete hard. They're nearby. Their crowd travels. And, when we wrestle there, they always have a sold-out show. We figured, let's just run it and see what we can do." Penn State ended up winning the match, 35-3, with 12,049 fans in atten- dance. Sanderson's 2025 team returns nu- merous starters from last year's squad, which won the NCAA team champion- ship for the third season in a row. The roster includes sophomores Braeden Davis and Tyler Kasak, redshirt sopho- more Mitchell Mesenbrink, juniors Levi Haines and Aaron Nagao, and super se- niors Beau Bartlett, Carter Starocci and Greg Kerkvliet. How the weight classes shake out this fall, however, remains to be seen. There has been speculation that Starocci will move up in weight to 197 pounds, and it's also possible that Haines and Mesen- brink will flip their weight classes, with the former moving to 165 and the latter to 157. Another intriguing question involves the 149-pound class. Kasak manned it as Visit From Hawkeyes Highlights 2024-25 Home Schedule G R E G P I C K E L | G R E G . P I C K E L @ O N 3 . C O M WRESTLING The Nittany Lions wrestle one match per year at the Bryce Jordan Center. The date and opponent for this year's BJC dual had yet to be announced as of early September. PHOTO COURTESY PENN STATE ATHLETICS