PRIME TIME
What does it take for wrestlers to peak at NCAAs?
Call it March Madness if you will, but the only really crazy thing about the NCAA wrestling tournament is what separates the good wrestlers from the great wrestlers. Any of the 330 wrestlers who makes it to the national championship are successful. But only six percent of those competitors make it to Saturday night, the NCAA finals.
But then again, there has been Oklahoma State’s Johnny Thompson, who never watched the 133-pound finals in Iowa City in 2001, in Albany, N.Y., in 2002 and in Kansas City in 2003. That’s because the Cowboy was part of each of those championship matches and won it the last two years.
“I’m a competitor,” Thompson said about his success at the NCAAs, where the senior from Oklahoma City has a combined 14-1 record over the nine days that made up the past three national tournaments. “I like to go out there and do everything I like to do. It’s the way everything has worked out for me.”
But not everything has worked so well for Thompson this season, who lost six regular-season matches this season, one less than the same number of setbacks (7) he had suffered over 95 matches before his senior year in Stillwater.
And yet fans cannot write off this Cowboy, especially after he won his fourth straight Big 12 championship and will be the only NCAA participant who has appeared in three NCAA finals.
“Most people had written Johnny off too soon, but somebody forgot to tell J
ohnny,” laughed Oklahoma State coach John Smith, the former two-time NCAA champ who also appear-ed in three NCAA finals during his OSU career (1985-88). “He’s a warrior; he’s had to battle back from a lot of adversity and he’s going to have to have the same attitude and spirit at the national tournament.”
“March is what matters so (regular-season) losses weren’t that important,” Thompson said. “Losses do make you look at yourself and see what you are doing wrong.”
Thompson said he wasn’t looking to make a statement to skeptics.
“I just need to go out and wrestle my best and work towards peaking at the national tournament.”
So why has Thompson been so successful at peaking in postseason?
“It’s the right state of mind, right physical condition, right training in the wrestling room,” Thompson said. “All those aspects put together makes you peak at the right time.”
Smith hopes Thompson’s teammates remember that even after OSU dominated the Big 12s, where eight Cowboys made the finals, only four of his wrestlers won the conference championship. Smith hopes this will leave more hunger in the eyes of his recent Big 12 runner-ups, including 174-pound Chris Pendleton, who lost his first match of the season to Missouri’s Ben Askren; someone who lost three times to Pendleton during the regular season.
“Those (Big 12) finals showed it takes a total focus of seven minutes,” Smith said.
“If you have an average match at Nationals, you find yourself fighting through the loser’s bracket.”
Oklahoma State’s 149-pound Big 12 champ Zack Esposito is feeding off Thompson’s success.
“A guy like Johnny Thompson faced adversity in the beginning of the year. This just shows that he’s getting ready to peak,” said Esposito, a sophomore who failed to place in last year’s NCAAs after being seeded second.
Meanwhile, other schools are facing the same challenge between NCAA qualifying tournaments and the big show in St. Louis: when to train hard and when to rest.
“Peaking is huge,” said Oklahoma redshirt freshman Sam Hazewinkel after capturing the 125-pound Big 12 championship where he defeated top-ranked Jason Powell of Nebraska. “There’s one thing our coaches really know and that’s peaking.”
Hazewinkel, a native of Pensacola, Fla., said he learned about not peaking well after he went unbeaten (140-0) in high school and won three state championships but failed to win the High School Nationals following his senior year.
“Before I was going hard, hard, hard. I think that’s key, but there’s a point when you start wearing down,” the Sooner said. “The mental part of the game is 90 percent of the game.”
On the mat, Hazewinkel appears calm considering this will be his first NCAAs but admits he feels fear as well.
“You always get nervous but what helps me is once you get out on the mat it all goes away. Once you are on the mat, you are in the zone; there is no fear,” said Hazewinkel, who added that he gets plenty of advice from his father, Dave, a 1972 Olympian, and teammate Teyon Ware, who won the 141-pound championship as a true freshman last March.
“I don’t know if he can put it into words now,” Hazewinkel said. “He loved it. He had something to prove. People asked if he could do it in college. He went out and did it.”
So how much does past NCAA experience help? Does a wrestler like Thompson have a mental edge over his foes?
“It definitely gives you the upper hand being in the finals three times,” Thompson said. “But it’s not that big of a deal. Nobody is going to go out there and make it to the national finals and be nervous and fall down.”