The moment has finally arrived for four athletes from the Penn wrestling team. Today is the first day of the NCAA Tournament in St. Louis, a three-day event. When all is said and done, national championships will be decided and All-Americans awarded.
The four Red and Blue wrestlers in attendance, who earned their NCAA bids at the EIWA Championships two weeks ago, are Mason Lenhard (125 pounds), Doug McGraw (141), Dustin Wiles (174), and Matt Feast (285). This group has aspirations to be in the mix three days from now, but first they must clear some big hurdles.
Feast comes in ranked No. 6 nationally, the only one of the Quakers to be seeded in the field. But for the Quakers to be successful as a squad, his teammates will need to pull off some upsets against the country's elite competition.
"Anything can happen in this tournament and once the whistle blows, it doesn't much matter what your ranking is. It doesn't much matter what your seed is. What matters is what happens on the mat," Penn coach Roger Reina said.
Feast knows what it takes to do just that. This will be the senior's fourth and final NCAA appearance, having been an All-American the last two years and making it all the way to the semifinals last year.
If Feast wrestles according to his seed, his fourth-round match could be quite interesting. Of the top 10 wrestlers in the weightclass, the Penn grappler has wrestled and beaten all but one: No. 3, Cain Velasquez.
Who is he lined up to wrestle in the fourth round? None other than the junior from Arizona State. Feast, however, likes the idea of wrestling someone for the first time at the national level.
Lenhard, at 125, will have no cake walk in the first bout of his second NCAA tournament. The senior drew No. 7 Andrew Hochstrasser of Boise State. The two have already wrestled once this year, at the Las Vegas Invitational back in December, where Lenhard dropped the decision, 11-7.
"Hochstrasser has a little bit of an unorthodox style to wrestle against," Reina said. "Now we've got a much better idea of how to wrestle Hochstrasser in terms of style."
McGraw, at 141, will see action in his third-consecutive NCAA tournament. In the first round, the senior will match up with No. 12 Cassio Pero of Illinois. The Quakers are familiar with Pero, having seen the Illini at Midlands this year and in years past.
Finally, there is Wiles, whose first NCAA championship will be somewhat of a homecoming. The junior hails from Farmington, Mo., not far from St. Louis.
"It's pretty close to home, so I'm pretty excited about that," Wiles said. "I have a lot of family coming out, and some friends, so it should be a good time."
Wiles will be challenged immediately, though, as he is slated to face either No. 3 Pete Friedl of Illinois or Kevin Gabrielson of North Carolina State.
