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Two Home-Grown Wrestlers to Compete at Nationals
March 14, 2016 04:33 PM | Wrestling
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - West Virginia University junior wrestler Dylan Cottrell said he always wanted to be a Mountaineer, it just took him a couple of years to get to the right place.
The Spencer, West Virginia, resident began his collegiate career wrestling for the Appalachian State Mountaineers, but has since found a home competing for those other Mountaineers – his home-state West Virginia Mountaineers.
“I love our state and I wish I could have been here the whole time, but this is what I’ve got – two years – and I’m going to embrace that and I’m going to promote West Virginia wrestling in a positive way and I want to see this program succeed, not only now, but also in the future,” he said.
Cottrell is doing his part to take care of the present by qualifying for this year’s NCAA championships at 157 pounds. Fellow Mountain State native Jacob A. Smith, not to be confused with WVU teammate Jacob S. Smith from Clifton Forge, Virginia, or Stephen A. Smith from ESPN First Take, is also competing in this year’s NCAA championships in New York City this weekend.
Smith, a 197-pounder from Charleston, is just the second seeded wrestler for the Mountaineers in the national tournament in seven years. He enters this year’s championship seeded 13th.
Like Cottrell, Smith took the crooked road to Morgantown through Cleveland, Ohio. And also like Cottrell, he’s proud to be promoting the Flying WV on a national stage.
“A lot of kids coming up through West Virginia wrestling are always told they can’t compete with Ohio wrestling, or Pennsylvania wrestling, or the wrestlers from out in the Midwest,” Smith said. “Well, I beg to differ. I’ve seen a lot of kids come up through the programs and they win in high school and it seems like when they get to the collegiate level, they let people say that they can’t compete nationally and it gets to their head and they go off in a different direction.”
Smith said that mindset held him back a little bit, but once he got to WVU and began training with Coach Sammie Henson, his outlook changed – for the better.
“As soon as I stepped foot in collegiate wrestling, I knew where I was and the style of training I was under and I wasn’t going to attain the goals that I wanted to reach,” he admitted.
So when Henson got the WVU job two years ago, it was an easy decision for Smith to transfer from Cleveland State to West Virginia University. Henson’s reputation in collegiate and international wrestling circles was too good for Smith to pass up.
“Coaches make you who you are as a wrestler, I’m a firm believer in that, and from knowing Sammie from before, when he got the job here and knowing how he wrestles, that’s exactly how I want to wrestle,” Smith said.
It was a similar deal for Cottrell, who admitted he has had to learn a totally new way of wrestling under Henson.
“Sammie’s system is a system and I had to learn that, and I finally now feel comfortable on top and getting into the positions he wants me to get to,” Cottrell said. “That’s helped out my confidence a bunch and that’s why I feel like I’m wrestling the best I’ve wrestled this year.”
Indeed, Cottrell has come on of late with some strong performances after several near misses against ranked wrestlers earlier this season. He enters this year’s national tournament ranked 17th in the country with a 30-9 record.
Smith has performed consistently well all season and takes a solid 30-10 record into this year’s national tournament.
West Virginia has three wrestlers competing this year - Oakland, Maryland, senior Bubba Scheffel being the other at 184 pounds, which, admittedly, is not the number Henson expected when the season began, but he knows that number is soon about to change.
Zeke Moisey, whose surprising run to the NCAA finals last year at 125 pounds turned the sport upside down, was forced to miss this year’s national tournament due to an injury. Henson also has the No. 3-rated recruiting class from last season in his hip pocket, plus, another strong recruiting haul in the making this year.
Many associated with the sport of wrestling view Henson’s Mountaineer program as a beach ball being pushed down into the water, and soon, that ball is about to pop out of the water.
And, it’s nice to see some home-grown talent playing a role in West Virginia’s ascension.
“It speaks for the direction of our program and what we’re trying to do,” said Henson, who guided WVU to a top 20 finish at nationals in his first season in 2015. “You’ve got to win your own state and you have to win it in recruiting. In West Virginia, we’re trying to cultivate relationships with guys, reaching out to Parkersburg, Parkersburg South, Huntington or wherever they come from, I don’t care.”
Just as long as they don’t end up in Blacksburg, Virginia, as Parkersburg’s Jared Haught chose to do, or Huntington’s Justin Arthur, who is now wrestling at Nebraska.
“We have quite a few young guys coming up in the state of West Virginia that we’re going to be looking at,” Henson said.
He’s also got a couple of West Virginia guys on his roster that he can keep track of right now.
“Jake has been solid all year and Dylan has really come on and had a strong finish,” Henson noted. “Dylan has had some tight matches with some good wrestlers, but I see him breaking through and winning some of those matches.
“Jake has done it and and the people that have wrestled Dylan know that he’s there,” Henson added.
The run Moisey made last year going to the 125-pound finals as an unseeded wrestler is not surprising to those who train under Henson, but it does affirm that his methods work. What Henson does is all encompassing, from planning their meals with the athletic department’s dietitian, Nettie Freshour, to making sure his assistants have all of their travel details taken care of, to assiduously studying tape of their opponents.
He wants to remove as many outside variables as possible to make sure his guys are maximizing their talents on the mat.
“I’m a big believer in scouting and analyzing film,” Henson said. “I look for tendencies; I don’t look for what they do as much as, ‘Do they scratch their head before they shoot?’ Little things like that because we all have tendencies.”
When Henson was a world champion wrestler, he said he hated watching tape so he let his coaches do it for him.
“I would always ask my coach, ‘What did he have? Does he have a trick move? What leg does he lead with and does he have a gas tank?’ That was all I needed to know,” he said.
But Henson also realizes that some of his guys want more knowledge - they want to get as much information as possible, so he sits down with them to study tape together.
It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach with Henson.
“There has been nothing but consistent growth since I’ve gotten here,” Smith admitted. “Our training during the season is all geared toward March.”
The collegiate wrestling season is long and grueling, and although what happens in December, January and February is important, wrestlers, coaches and programs are judged by what they do at the national tournament in March.
Get one kid to the finals and it’s a top-20 season; have a couple kids make a deep run and you’re looking at top 10. Get three or more to the podium and now you’re really in business.
“For wrestling, the national tournament and how you finish is how we’re evaluated,” Henson said. “When we go to tournaments it’s individualized. We’re a family, but I tell our guys, ‘If you take care of yourself, you will take care of the team.’”
Three West Virginia University wrestlers are about to do that this weekend. It just so happens that two of them are born and bred Mountaineers, even if it took them a couple of years to get to the place they belonged.
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