By Courtney Baumann
Coming off two-straight losses to No. 1 Oklahoma State and No. 2 Penn State, the Iowa wrestling team needs to pick up some momentum for this weekend’s dual meet against Ohio State.
The Buckeyes will head to Carver-Hawkeye for a Friday night matchup. Ohio State, ranked No. 4, is unbeaten thus far in dual competition, posting wins over such ranked teams as Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
Ohio State boasts eight top-20 wrestlers, three of whom are No. 1 in their weight classes — Nathan Tomasello at 133, Bo Jordan at 174, and Kyle Snyder at 285. Iowa will not see Snyder wrestle, however, because he recently left for Krasnoyarsk, Russia.
However, Tomasello and Jordan will be in the lineup. Tomasello moved up to 133 this year after competing at 125 in his first two seasons, when he won back-to-back Big Ten titles and was the NCAA champion in 2015.
Thomas Gilman has a 2-1 record against Tomasello over the past two years, but although the two have history, there is not much advice Gilman can give to teammate Cory Clark on how to win his match.
“If he’s going to go out there and beat him, he’s got to go out there and wrestle him hard, that’s all there is to it. He’s a tough guy.
He’s a competitor,” Gilman said. “I don’t like the guy whatsoever, but I have a lot of respect for him. He’s a hard wrestler … There’s no magic formula just because I wrestled him.”
That’s OK, though, because Clark understands what he will be up against and is ready for the competition.
“It’s just another opponent, but there’s kind of an exclamation point,” Clark said. “Tomasello’s proved that he’s solid, he’s got good fundamentals, and that he can wrestle. I’ve got to stay tough the whole match and do what [I] do best.”
Stoll out, Holloway back in
Sophomore Sam Stoll has been the No. 1 guy at heavyweight for Iowa since the first match of his redshirt freshman season, but he will now miss the rest of the season with a torn ACL.
He missed a large portion of the first half of the 2016-2017 season with a knee injury he sustained at the Big Ten Tournament last year, which prevented him from competing in the NCAA Tournament a few weeks later.
During his absence, redshirt freshman Steven Holloway occupied the spot in all but one match, and he made a return last weekend after Stoll’s injury was officially announced. The West Burlington native lost by technical fall to No. 5 Nick Nevills and dropped to 5-6 on the season.
Questions on whether Holloway will continue to hold the position down for Iowa floated around, but Iowa wrestling head coach Tom Brands put those to rest.
“You saw Holloway at the beginning of the season, and now you’re going to see Holloway at the end of the season,” Brands said. “Steven Holloway is going to be our heavyweight going forward … He’s got a tough task. He should love it and embrace it. It’s an opportunity that he might not have had otherwise.”
Bouncing back
As always, the team is only focused on moving ahead, whether they are moving with success or not.
One of the mottos for the Hawkeyes is, “It’s easier to move forward with success,” which Brands got from former Iowa head coach Dan Gable.
“In wrestling, there are individual matches,” Brands said. “There are some degrees of success, even though we lost two dual meets the past weekends. You can still move forward, and you move forward with not success also, because that’s what you do … with the right mindset.”