ISU collapse gives Iowa Midlands title

EVANSTON, Ill. – Iowa State won just two of 10 place matches Tuesday at the Midlands Wrestling Championships and the result was a second straight championship for intrastate rival Iowa.

The Hawkeyes scored 156 ½ points, three points better than ISU. Missouri was a distance third with 121 ½ points.
Iowa trailed ISU by 11 points after Tuesday’s first session, but rallied behind three wins in five championship matches, including two head-to-head matches against the Cyclones.

“I see a team with a lot of potential,” ISU coach Cael Sanderson said following the championships. “If we can make a little progress and fix a few mistakes that we’re making, we’ve got a pretty danged good team.”

ISU’s only contested win in a place match came at 285 pounds where David Zabriskie avenged an earlier loss to Missouri’s Dom Bradley, who was wrestling unattached, with a 5-2 win in the third-place match. The Cyclones’ other win, also in a third-place match, came at 141 pounds where Nick Gallick beat Tony Dalie, unattached (Central Michigan), by medical forfeit. The win was the eighth straight for Gallick, who lost in the first round.

Five of the eight losses came in championship matches.

It all stated at 125 pounds where Tyler Clark dropped a 3-2 decision to Northwestern’s Brandon Precin. Iowa’s Daniel Dennis, seeded fourth, upset second-seeded Nick Fanthorpe, 4-3, and former ISU assistant coach Chris Bono added insult to injury with a 4-2 overtime decision against Cyler Sanderson at 157 pounds.

Bono and Sanderson ended regulation tied at 1-1. After a scoreless first overtime period, Sanderson took a 1-0 lead with an escape. Bono made it 3-2 with a takedown seconds before the period ended and then put the match away with an escape in the third overtime session.

Jon Reader and Iowa’s Ryan Morningstar also went into overtime with Morningstar prevailing by a 5-4 score on an escape in the third overtime period. The escape came after Morningstar rode Reader for 30 seconds in the second overtime period.

The coups de grâce for ISU came at 197 pounds where Wisconsin’s Dallas Herbst used a reversal with 30 seconds left in the match to hand Jake Varner his first loss, 2-1.

“There were a lot of strange matches tonight,” Sanderson said. “We’ll be a better team because of it and it really highlights the things we need to work on. We have two months until the National Tournament, plenty of time to make the progress we need.”

Sanderson stopped short of saying he was disappointed in his team’s performance.

“I don’t really look at wins and loses,” Sanderson said. “Of course we want to win, everyone wants to win, but I look at them more as performance aids. Are we doing the things that we’re working on? Are we fighting? We’re doing better. The wins and loses will take care of themselves when we go out and do what we need to do. We’re getting close.”

In other results on Tuesday, redshirt freshman Dalton Jensen, who lost to Gallick in the 141-pound consolation semifinals, finished sixth in his first Midlands tournament. Jensen was pinned by Old Dominion’s Ryan Williams in 1 minute, 32 seconds in the fifth-place match.

Kyle Simonson, also competing at the Midlands for the first time, finished eighth at 197 pounds when he was pinned by Maryland’s Hudson Taylor in 1:25, and 184-pound Jerome Ward finished sixth after dropping a 3-2 decision to Jordan Blanton of Illinois.

All five ISU semifinalists breezed through their matches Tuesday morning to reach the finals. Clark beat Jay Ivanco of Clarion, 10-4; Fanthorpe was an 8-4 winner against Steve Bell of Maryland; Cyler Sanderson beat Missouri’s Michael Chandler, 9-5; Reader handed Andrew Howe of Wisconsin a 7-5 loss; and Varner advanced because of a medical forfeit by Trevor Brandvold, unattached (Wisconsin).

The Cyclones lost 149-pound Mitch Mueller in a fifth-round consolation match Tuesday afternoon when he lost to David Cheza, unattached (Michigan State), 4-0.

By: Dick Kelly (Original)