Asst. Wrestling coach is fifth in trials

Brandon Slay is a former Penn All-American. Trevor Lewis is a former Penn assistant coach and current Wharton associate director of finance and administration. And Brian Dolph has been a Penn assistant coach for five years. All three wrestlers competed in the Freestyle World Team Trials last weekend in Seattle's Mercer Arena. Dolph finished fifth and Slay took home sixth place, but none of the three grapplers will represent the United States in the World Championships in Turkey. Coincidentally, however, all three wrestlers with Penn connections competed in the same 167.5-pound weight class. So, obviously, there was a chance that two of them might have to wrestle each other. And that's exactly what happened on Saturday when Dolph and Slay squared off in the mini-tournament semifinals. Slay had defeated his former wrestling partner, 3-2, earlier in the year, but Dolph avenged the loss with a nail-biting 1-0 overtime victory. Dolph scored on Slay early with one of his signature moves, an inside trip. "I definitely knew that he had that [move] and he's tried to hit that on me many, many times," Slay said. "I knew he was gonna do it. He just set it up real well. I even felt it coming and he did it so well that I couldn't stop it." Both Dolph and Slay wrestled conservatively after Dolph's early takedown, and the score was still 1-0 after the the end of regulation. "I had to stay patient and control position and [Slay] was kind of doing the same thing -- waiting for an opportunity to score," Dolph said. "It ended up a stalemate situation the rest of the match." Neither wrestler scored the requisite three points in the two standard three-minute periods, so a sudden death three-minute overtime had to be contested. Dolph and Slay both failed to score in the overtime period as well, so the final score ended up 1-0 in favor of Dolph. "I just kept trying to score on him," Slay said. "I tried to open some attacks, but I really didn't set my shots up well enough and I didn't wrestle hard enough in the overtime period to get the point that I needed." After defeating Slay, Dolph faced Steve Marianetti in the mini-tournament semifinals. Marianetti took a 3-1 lead deep into the match, but Dolph scored a takedown late in the match to cut the lead to one. The Indiana graduate could not manage to knot the score, however. "I had probably 10 seconds to try to turn him over and score another point to try to tie it or go ahead and I ran out of time," Dolph said. Dolph then lost 9-0 in the battle for fifth place to Dan St. John, who, like Slay, is a United States Olympic Training Center resident. St. John had moved down a weight class prior to the match, so he had an edge on the Ridley Park, Pa., native in size. "I ate breakfast at seven [a.m.]," Dolph said. "And the rest of the day I only ate a power bar, so my intensity was terrible that match [against St. John]. He was big and strong and I needed some energy and strength to overcome his size and it just wasn't there." Slay and Lewis were also defeated by St. John on Saturday. St. John downed Lewis, 5-3, in the quarterfinals and Slay, 4-1, in the consolation semifinals. "The move he caught me on, he turned me," Slay said. "He didn't take me down, he turned me. I know that was the type of technique he was looking for and I just didn't defend it well enough." Slay defeated another U.S. Olympic Training Center Resident, Jason Kraft, 6-0, to finish sixth in the tournament after winning three of his five matches. Kraft had knocked Lewis out of the tournament with a 4-0 victory over the former Penn assistant in the consolation quarterfinals. Lewis and Dolph train together in West Philadephia. But although they wrestle against each other often on Penn's mats, they did not want to face each other in Seattle. "Did I want to wrestle Trevor?" Dolph said. "No, I'd like to avoid that if possible. If anything, I'd like us to be both in the finals." Joe Williams, a former Iowa All-American, was the champion in the 167.5-pound weight class. Slay was defeated by Williams, 7-4, in the 1998 NCAA Finals.