Sports – Regular Guy

Caring by Not Caring

brian — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 19:27:25 +0000

My career as a full-time journalist ended almost 22 years ago. I last wrote something for a newspaper about 7 years ago. My identity is no longer wrapped up in that profession. I haven’t felt that way for a long time. However, I am immensely grateful especially right now for one of the lessons I learned in the decade where newspapers ruled every aspect of my life.

I have an incredible ability to not give a shit about the minutiae around sports because I had to write about the minutia around sports all the time.

Spending so much time as a full-time sports writer made me gain an incredible appreciation for sports on their own. I didn’t need to argue every finer point or take a position on every drama. I learned that I could just sit back and watch a game to appreciate the skills of the people involved and the chaos that can come from any competition.

In the end, I realize that none of it matters. Maybe a few things do, but they only matter to the people involved. That’s why I ask you sports talk radio or punditry because they really are just exercises in useless conversation.

Fast forward to this week when the college wrestling community, especially on Twitter, lost their collective minds over an injustice that some worry will destroy the sport as we know it for all eternity. The crime that will bring about this ruin? Some wrestlers decided to not compete in the final match of their conference tournament instead of risking injury or an embarrassing loss two weeks before the NCAA championship tournament.

Pretty much all of these guys were guaranteed a spot in the national tournament when they decided to take what is known in the sport as a medical forfeit. The extent of their injuries was not always clear, but the rigors of a collegiate wrestling season catch up to everyone by this time of the year.

That is the worst insult grown-ass men watching on television could ever imagine. I could not believe how people lost their minds. Well, I guess I should because as I sit back in my hobby chair of enjoyment, I have seen lots of idiots going crazy over things that matter very little in the scheme of things. But this was beyond the pale.

One guy even traced back to a match in December when one wrestler decided not to compete in a dual meet against another highly ranked opponent. He said that decision was part of a season-long scheme to game the system in order to have a better road to the finals match at the national tournament. Somehow, this kid and his coach knew how every other match in his weight class would end up back in December so he could enact his master plan in March. Diabolical!

These points often come from people who are sad that they never achieved what they wanted to and need to insult other athletes in order to overcome their weaknesses. One of my problems with the wrestling community, like other niche communities I am part of, is the people involved. They can ruin it with their myopia and selfishness.

But I won’t let that get to me. I intend to sit in front of the television watching all three days of the NCAA tournament and loving every second of it because sports, when it comes down to it, are awesome. I can just do without the fans.

Adults Ruin Sports

brian — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 15:03:17 +0000

I had a pretty good high school wrestling career. I set a bunch of school records. I sat high in the state rankings most of my last two seasons. I won a bunch of tournaments.

However, I can’t say that I won a state championship. That’s not for lack of trying. I literally could not even compete for a state title.

I grew up in Maryland where the state tournaments are restricted to public schools by state law. The private schools have a state championship now, but that didn’t exist until long after 1986 when I graduated.

I think of this now as the annual complaining about separating public and private schools in post-season competition heats up in Pennsylvania. One thing comes to mind when I hear about this idea.

It’s stupid.

Looking back on my high school athletic career, nothing wrankles me more than not knowing how I would have stacked up against the public school wrestlers.

I kind of know who I could and couldn’t beat, but all of that happened in out-of-season competition, which doesn’t count in many official eyes.

I have no doubt that I would have rather wrestled in a state tournament and lost to Greg Day or Keith Burgess (the state champs in 1986 at my weight) than have the situation where public and private school athletes competed separately.

As it stood, I won the Maryland Scholastic Association title, a league comprised of Baltimore City public schools (who chose to compete outside the state championships) and Baltimore area private schools. The MSA title was prestigious, but there is still that question: could I beat Greg or Keith?

I didn’t even have a senior all-star match that would have let me at least wrestle Greg. (Keith was an underclassman.) He probably would have handily won the match, but Maryland didn’t begin their senior all-star match until a year or two later.

And I know I would have beaten Jeff Klapka, who was named Second Team All-Metro ahead of me by the Baltimore Sun that year. Not that I am bitter more than 30 years later or anything. I beat him that summer and took out my frustration on the paper’s bad decision and the stupid split system on him.

Never knowing who will win a competition should wrankle people more than whether a private school recruits. Let the kids compete. The parents are the ones always ruining things. Don’t let them ruin this further by segregating high school sports even more.

Book Review: The Boys Are Back

brian — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 14:30:21 +0000

Growing up a sports-obsessed teen in the early 1980s, I have distinct memories of the Dunbar basketball team. I never saw them play in person, but I read dozens of stories about them (Baltimore had three daily papers back then, and I read each sports section cover to cover) and watched them on the news.

I knew about how the Poets could get the city’s best players to transfer in because of the schools dental studies program. I knew how Reggie Lewis had to swallow pride and be the sixth man. I knew how people had to see Muggsy Bogues in action to believe him.

That’s why I snapped up The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball by Alejandro Danois recently. The book takes readers through Dunbar’s 1981-82 season, the one that introduced them to basketball fans across the country. They had already cemented their iconic status in Baltimore with their battles with Calvert Hall (my high school’s rival, so I always took Dunbar’s side) before this season, but Bob Wade’s team hit the road to make even more people realize how good East Baltimore could play.

I sailed through the book. They have really engaging anecdotes from the key figures on the team, spelling out the challenges the players faced both off the court and as part of a super team coached by a disciplinarian like Wade. While the story is essentially an uplifting one, punches are not pulled as the players – now all successful adults – cop to the teenage hijinks that took place during the season.

I really enjoyed reading some of the inside baseball that I did not know. For instance, I had no idea that Lewis – who died in 1993 from a congenital heart problem that he likely knew about, but hid from people – transferred to Dunbar for the ’81-82 season after he was cut as a sophomore from the team at Patterson High School. Imagine a player confident enough to say, “I didn’t make that team so I am going to the best team in the city to show them!”

Bogues also dealt with issues from his previous school. An administrative error kept him from enrolling at Dunbar in 1980, leaving him at Southern High School with a lot of anger. His arrival at Dunbar the next year filled the gap Wade thinks kept the team from upsetting Calvert Hall the previous year. The book does a great job showing the family issues Bogues had to deal with and how the used the way people reacted to his 5-foot-3 frame as fuel to become a game changer.

We also learn about personal issues David Wingate carried on his shoulders during the season and how players from competing recreation centers around the city came together to prove that Dunbar could rise to the top.

If I have any quibble, it comes with the parts where Danois writes about the Dunbar-Calvert Hall rivalry. First off, he refers to them as Calvert on more than one occasion. That never happens. They are Calvert Hall. Calvert is a high school in southern Maryland. Secondly, while he gets the part about Calvert Hall ducking Dunbar correct, he doesn’t delve into the back story as to why that mattered in Baltimore.

Public school sports are run in Maryland are run by a state-affiliated agency – the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association (MPSSAA). This is the group that runs state championship events.

However, up until 1994, Baltimore City schools did not belong to the MPSSAA. They were part of the Maryland Scholastic Association, a sports organization comprised of city schools and area Catholic and private schools. I grew up watching (and later competing in) MSA sports where kids from the city brushed shoulders with kids living in mansions. It was a pretty unique arrangement that provided an awesome experience.

The only exception was basketball. Back in the 1970s, the Catholic schools pulled out of the MSA basketball competition because of some controversial games, including one involving Dunbar and Mt. St. Joe (where all my brothers attended school). The Catholic League formed in 1972, taking away regular-season basketball matchups between schools like Dunbar and Calvert Hall.

So the way Calvert Hall coach Mark Amatucci ducked Dunbar had even more meaning when the people in Baltimore knew that those two schools had the chance to compete alongside each other in many other sports. This wasn’t just about a good Catholic school ducking a good public school. This was about the Catholic schools not wanting to play the city schools in basketball at all.

I think adding in that flavor and maybe exposing the rift between the (mostly black) city schools and (mostly white, except for some athletes) Catholic schools would have helped explain why not getting a chance to play Calvert Hall rankled the Dunbar folks so much. Otherwise, this is a great look at a pretty special time in Baltimore sports history.

You Get a Trophy! You Get a Trophy! You Get a Trophy!

brian — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 11:36:12 +0000

I tried to resist, but I had want to weigh in with an alternate view on the kerfuffle about participation trophies for young athletes, sparked by NFL player James Harrison taking these kinds of trophies away from his 8 and 6-year-old sons because they didn’t “earn” them.

So if you are predisposed to dislike the practice, don’t think of them as participation trophies.

Think of them as “I put up with Mom and Dad video taping my every move and screaming at me even though I am really trying as hard as I can” trophies.

Or “I play this sport year round because they tell me it will make me a better player even though I haven’t even lost all my baby teeth yet” awards.

Or “I’d rather be doing something else, but Dad signed me up for this even though I said I didn’t want to do it” awards.

In an era when so many parents – myself included – shower the latest technologies on our kids and work to provide them every advantage we can get, is a trophy really the one thing that will let them think that life might not be a struggle at times? Some parents outfit their kids for instructional leagues with the latest and greatest equipment and record every at bat, goal or foul shot, but a trophy causes disillusionment? A trophy that was conceived by adults?

This trend did not come from a referendum of 8-year-olds. Second graders did not rise up and demand athletic socialism. Adults came up with this idea. So the solution is for a millionaire to yank trophies away from his kids, tell them they don’t deserve them and shame anyone else who thinks that a piece of plastic isn’t that big of a deal?

Many kids can’t remember to do a chore you told them to do 90 seconds ago, so I don’t see how a participation trophy will send them on some lifelong philosophical journey that will have them questioning the meaning of life because they finished in last place in a tournament and still got an award when they were 7.

I might have a skewed perspective on this, however, because I officiate youth wrestling in the winter. But when I regularly see kids in tears before they even begin to compete, I don’t know if we should be worrying about a trophy at the end. We should be taking stock of the entire youth sports enterprise and how parents approach it.

Youth sports can bring about so many benefits. Losing gracefully and applying the lessons from a negative experience can really benefit youngsters. But that comes from calm conversation which teaches perspective, not parents arguing over who deserves a trophy.

Just make sure that before and after they get their grubby paws on that trophy that they have actually learned something else and that you and/or the coaches have helped them gain incremental improvement in the skills of the sport.

If your kid gets something you don’t think they really earned, don’t take it away. Sit down with them and talk with them about the experience. Find out what they liked and didn’t like. Put some context around the trophy. Let the kid enjoy it for one simple reason.

They’re a kid and sometimes it’s nice to get something shiny. If you don’t think they deserve it, take away the iPad, not the trophy.

Coming Off the Ledge

brian — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 13:40:36 +0000

Sixteen years ago, I remember going out on a ledge.

At the time, I was working as a sportswriter for this very newspaper. In fact, I was only a few weeks from the end of my full-time employment at 135 Baltimore Street. That job change and the risk I took are not connected.

I sat down to write a column and knew I might not get the best reception for my topic. I had probably done it before, giving me some insight into the potential backlash. I forged ahead nonetheless.

My column focused on the upcoming World Cup in France. I professed my love for the sport at a time when many folks really didn’t care about the impact of the naturalization of defender David Regis and how that would affect the US team in the summer of 1998. (Spoiler alert: It played a role in our awful last-place performance.)

As I begin to finalize my plans for the 2014 World Cup, I know that I will have many more people sharing my interest than I did in 1998. No one really got upset at that column, which I might add had a tremendous name drop of young defender Leo Cullen, a player some thought could be a shining star for future US teams. He ended up being a marginal pro.

I feel grateful that I got in on the ground floor of soccer fandom in the US. My fraternity in college had a bunch of players on the varsity team, which infected me with the bug that really exploded in the mid-1990s.

Since then, I have seen the US team play a bunch of times in various locations. I have flown to Columbus, Ohio, and made a kamikaze drive to suburban Boston to root on our national team. I have also fretted alone in my basement during World Cup games and hugged strangers in bars when things have gone well.

I have a network of friends spread across the country who I have met through watching games or at least arguing about them online. I remember the times when we had to follow games through the message board commentary of someone who had the hard-to-find broadcast of an important game.

That’s why writing about the 1998 World Cup represented some sort of risk. Now, I will be able to stream the games on my phone at work. I can choose from multiple public parties showing the games I want to see. I can bring up the US team in casual conversation without worrying that people will think I’m weird.

I mean, I know people will think I’m weird, but it will have nothing to do with talking about soccer.

The World Cup will occupy a lot of my thoughts for the next month, which is nothing new. But the differences between previous iterations and this year’s event are kind of stark.

If the US beats Portugal in their second game, I will celebrate in a bar with a large crowd. When we upset the same team in 2002, I watched alone in my house, careful not to wake up anyone else and sporadically running upstairs to post on a message board.

I’m glad that I don’t have to go out on that ledge anymore , but I kind of miss it.

Do the Olympics Have Sports Anymore?

brian — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:21:27 +0000

I’m sure everyone has heard the news by now. Due to a knee injury, marketing plans for NBC’s coverage of the upcoming Winter Olympics are up in the air. This knee injury may prevent millions of Americans from watching the Games.

Well, that’s the version I gleaned from my online interactions. In reality, American skiing star Lindsey Vonn announced she couldn’t ski next month at the Olympics because of an injury to her knee.

But why worry about the health and dreams of an athlete when we can talk about marketing plans and commercials?

I know that makes me sound curmudgeonly, but if it’s curmudgeonly to actually care about the sports more than the ratings, I’ll wear that badge with honor.

These days, I occupy a strange niche of sports fans. The sports themselves mean more to me than any of the stuff which goes on around them. The television networks, however, have little time for my kind because we’re a dying breed.

I do feel bad that Vonn won’t be able to ski in the Olympics, but this notion that she will kill the way NBC promotes the competition is just silly. Instead of breathless promo after breathless promo about her, we’ll have anguished profile after anguished profile about how her dreams have been dashed.

While that stuff is going on, people like me will be screaming at the television, “There are actual sports happening right now! Show them to me!”

Crazy, right?

Despite the fact that television coverage of the Olympics does everything it can to show us as little actual competition as possible, I remain entranced by the spectacle. As a kid, I dreamed of one day wrestling in front of the whole world on that stage.

Back then, Bruce Jenner ended up on the Wheaties box after he won his event. The post-game plans for athletes these days come way before anyone steps on the medal stand and sometimes don’t even reflect who won the competition.

Things have improved a little bit with the ability for NBC to stream sports online. Folks like me can tune into the things they love to watch that way and leave the “Today Show” treatment to the prime time program aimed at people who may not care who wins or loses.

I should learn to appreciate this development. I can plan my own schedule instead of sitting through teaser after teaser for something they will only show in a heavily-edited package at 10:50 p.m. That kind of stuff happens far too often these days.

So while NBC frets over how to re-frame the storylines they pre-determined months ago, I will scour the Internet for the best time to catch some curling action or live coverage of biathlon, one of those sports that continues to fascinate me.

As long as they don’t try and compare someone who hurts themselves to Lindsey Vonn, I’ll be OK. I don’t have anything against her. I just want to focus on the things that actually happen at the Olympics. I’m a weirdo like that.

Time for a Trip

brian — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:23:35 +0000

I approached my wife with a little trepidation. I don’t know why.

I should have no worries asking her about the fun things I want to do. We understand that parts of our personality differ so we might each want to strike out on our own at times.

This works out for me both ways. I get to run off and have my fun, and I don’t have to go see “Les Miserables” and things like that.

But, this time, I had some concerns. So I just asked the question and hoped nothing bad would happen.

“Do you mind if I plan a trip to Vegas for myself to cash in my winning ticket?”

She looked at me funny for a second before saying something I never expected to hear.

“What winning ticket?”

Let me go back in time for a bit. My wife had a chance to go to Vegas last spring for work. She took a few minutes out of her schedule to go to the sportsbook to make a special purchase.

For most of the last seven months, the $10 ticket on the Ravens to win the Super Bowl sat among a pile of papers in our computer room. When Baltimore used an improbably touchdown pass in its upset win of Denver a month or so ago, I made sure to find the ticket and put it in a prominent place.

I didn’t truly expect to win the bet when I had Maria buy the ticket. I hoped my team would win the Super Bowl. I wanted my team to win the Super Bowl. But I couldn’t get my hopes up too much until the big game approached.

Now I have a trip to Las Vegas to plan. Once she remembered buying the ticket, I got full blessing to go. The payout won’t pay for the whole thing, but I can stretch those dollars if I don’t aim too high.

Besides, the last time I traveled to Sin City, I booked a low-cost room and ended up staying in a two-story penthouse suite because some nice person at the front desk took pity on me for some reason. Sure, the place didn’t have the greatest air conditioning (this was in July), and some of the furnishings may have pre-dated my birth, but I scored a penthouse suite with no real effort.

Maybe my lucky streak will continue. Maybe I will cash in my ticket and turn that into a huge windfall. Maybe I will get upgraded to another nice room.

In reality, however, the end of my five-year absence from adult Disneyland will probably result in staying up too late, eating too many rich foods and a fair to middling gambling record.

That doesn’t matter to me, however. Regardless of what happens, I will know that I paid for part of the trip on one bet I made, a bet which I had to wait more than half a year to win. That’s why I deserve this trip more than anything.

At the very least, I can place another $10 on the Ravens for next year and cross my fingers.

Save Olympic Wrestling

brian — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:40:16 +0000

I have had the good fortune to take some really cool trips in my life. When I think back over them, one stands out in particular.

In 1984, I went to Los Angeles with two of my brothers to see the Olympics. Back then, a 16-year-old had a chance to get pretty good Olympic tickets with his two older brothers without breaking the bank.

We found lodging with a sibling of a family friend, managed to get tickets to three of the six freestyle wrestling sessions in the ticket lottery and figured we would just wing it for the rest of our time at the Games.

I will never forget seeing Randy Lewis execute some wacky reach-back throw in his gold medal match or hearing the scream of the Turkish competitor as American Mark Schultz used what was later ruled an illegal hold to break the Turk’s arm. As a young wrestler, I thought I had found heaven even though the Russians and many other top wrestling nations boycotted the Games.

Now we have to wonder if future generations of wrestlers will get a chance to experience the same thing, either in person or on television. The executive board of the International Olympic Committee decided to drop wrestling as a “core sport” starting in 2020.

The upshot is that wrestling will have to fight its way back into that year’s program as well as every other future Olympics. That is, if the IOC doesn’t come to its senses and reverse course.

The whole thing makes no sense to me. On a micro level, I react as a wrestler, as someone who has gained so much from the sport. I couldn’t imagine being who I am today without those long workouts, the painful weight cutting, the friendships forged on long rides crammed into cars, vans and even lounging on buses.

But as a sports fan, I recoil at the whole notion of limiting participation in the Olympics. Some people reacted to the wrestling news by picking the sport they find less worthy and making fun of that. I refuse to do that.

Sure, you may find the idea of table tennis or rhythmic gymnastics or modern pentathlon taking up room on the Olympic program silly, but the people who excel in those sports work their butts off too. They have suffered and sacrificed to get to the top of their game. Why punish them?

I know the Olympics have developed into a huge commercial and political organism. Those Olympics I attended probably represented one of the last ones that people could enjoy simply for the sports. My brothers and I walked up to the gate of a field hockey triple header, bought tickets for less than $5 each and sat in the front row.

Now, you need to plan months ahead of time just to get to any event. I don’t blame the inclusion of pro athletes. I don’t really blame anyone. Times change.

But that’s no reason to start telling people their sport doesn’t have enough TV viewers or doesn’t fit the Olympic ideal to fit some randomly-determined number of “core” sports. Aspects of the Olympics may have changed, but the notion of athletes testing themselves against the best in their sport shouldn’t apply to a select few.

The Olympics need more sports, not fewer. I’ll always believe that whether wrestling gets back in the Games or not.

Wardrobe Malfunction

brian — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:03:43 +0000

I knew the sound the moment I heard it. Unfortunately, I have experience in this area and started to think about the potential fallout.

The problem was, this all happened while I was in the midst of officiating a youth wrestling event, and I really had no chance to react or even fully assess the situation for a while. Finally, one of the young wrestlers watching the action from the sidelines alerted me to my plight.

“Hey, ref. You have a hole in your pants.”

From the mouths of babes. He was right. As I squatted down to start two little guys for one period, I heard the unmistakable sound of fabric ripping. I hoped I had not ripped too big a hole and pretty much put the problem out of my mind until the kid brought it to my attention.

During my next break, I scooted into the official’s locker room and surveyed the damage. The hole was bigger than I thought (bad news) but right along the seam (good news), meaning my wife could come to the rescue and fix it later in the week. Well, once she finished laughing at me.

Luckily, I wear dark-colored athletic shorts under my pants when I ref. Too much information, I know, but it spared me even further embarrassment. I still didn’t feel 100 percent comfortable sticking with the ripped pants for the rest of the day.

Saying I should just lose weight is easier said than done. I think we all know that. Even though I don’t have a big butt, it can still do some damage on pants when I bend over or squat down a little too quickly.

I did not have any sort of repair kit in my gym bag for this kind of situation. When I started reffing, I made sure to get a pair of pants which not only fit comfortably, but had an expandable waist to try and avoid this kind of situation. I didn’t have a spare pair because I had to officiate again that evening and left all my backup equipment at home for that event.

The school had its training room open, but I couldn’t find any safety pins or anything like that. No one I asked had any, but a woman selling decals and other items to the wrestlers had some black acrylic tape.

She apologized profusely as I stood with my backside facing her so she could se ejust how long of a piece of tape she needed for me. I put the black tape on the inside of the pants along the seam and reinforced it with some duck tape one of my colleagues had in his bag.

Voila!

I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to not reach back and see if the seam had split again. I already had one father jokingly tell me how I was driving the ladies crazy with the split pants so I managed to keep my sense of humor about the whole affair.

I just hoped my entire paycheck from the day doesn’t end up paying for extra pants as well as duck tape, safety pins and anything else I could think of to avoid this situation again.

My primer on Olympic Freestyle Wrestling

brian — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:39:56 +0000

Since I follow international wrestling, some people have asked me about my thoughts on the Olympic competition. Men’s freestyle, which starts tomorrow, is the area where I pay the most attention so I thought I’d put together a little primer on our US team. The ceiling is the highest I think a guy can place. The expected is self-explanatory. Some of this is hard because there is a blind draw and the only wrestlers eligible for the bronze medals (two in each weight) are guys who lose to the finalists so luck plays a big part of this. The 121 and 163 pound draws have already been released.

121 lbs. – Sam Hazewinkel: Haze will wrestle tomorrow and has a tough bout with a 2011 world bronze medalist from Kazakhstan last year right off the bat. I expected Nick Simmons, fifth in world last year, to take this weight, but Haze beat him at Trials. He won a couple of matches at the World Cup, but that wasn’t against the top guys. He was a Greco specialist until a few years ago. Ceiling: Fifth Place. Expected: No medal.

132 lbs. – Coleman Scott: This weight is one we should always do well in, but have only medaled in once since they went to the existing seven-weight system in 2002. Scott has been a standout since his high school days in western PA, but faces a difficult weight including Russia’s Besik Kudukhov, a multiple world champ, and Puerto Rico’s Franklin Gomez, who finished second to Kudukhov at worlds last year, but beat him in a match this year this year. Ironically, Scott’s only NCAA title came in a weight where Gomez was seeded first, but he was upset before the finals. I have irrational confidence in Scott, depending on the draw. Ceiling: Silver medal. Expected: Fifth Place.

145.5 lbs. – Jared Frayer: On paper, you should not expect much from Frayer. Another weight where we should reallye xcel, but no one really steps forward is left to this 33-year-old who has been on the fringes of the World team, but never broken through. The difference between him and a guy like Hazewinkel is tht Frayer has shown the ability to score points in bunches, especially off throws. I’m prepared for him to struggle, but know he can break through in a heartbeat. Ceiling: Bronze medal. Expected: No medal.

163 lbs. – Jordan Burroughs: It’s hard to believe that before last year’s World Championships, Burroughs did not have a freestyle background. Then he ran through that tournament, including a tough three-period win over defending champ Dennis Tsargush from Russia. Burroughs has an interesting draw with many of his top competitors in the same half of his bracket, but they will have to battle each other to see who reaches the semi. With his big smile and explosive double leg, Burroughs is poised to be a star this weekend. Ceiling: Gold medal. Expected: Gold medal.

185 lbs. – Jake Herbert: Full of personality, Herbert has seen all ends of the spectrum. Three years ago, he was second in the world. Two years ago, he had a brutal draw, losing to the eventual bronze medalist in the first round who lost to the eventual silver medalist the next round. Last year, former Olympic champ Cael Sanderson came out of retirement and beat Jake in World trials (then finished fifth in the world). He can beat anyone, but will the planets align to let him? Ceiling: Gold medal. Expected: Bronze medal.

211.5 lbs. – Jake Varner: This is where I really have high hopes. Varner was third at worlds last year and seems to be primed for a run. He trains with Sanderson, who has coached the last two NCAA Championship teams, and I just feel like he’ll be the solid, no-nonsense guy who will really frustrate the veterans here. At worlds, he got a pin in the wrestlebacks and beat a 2008 Olympic bronze medalist in three periods after losing the first one. Plus, he will wrestle on the last day so if we do well prior, he seems like the kind to feed off that. Ceiling: Gold medal. Expected: Silver or bronze medal.

264.5 lbs. – Tervel Dlagnev: Like the guys in the previous two weights, Tervel has been there. He was third three years ago and made the semis last year before ending up fifth. At that event, he beat two-time Olympic and two-time World gold medalist Artur Taymazov from Uzbekistan so he can hang with the big boys. Once again, it comes down to the draw, but we have traditionally done well in this weight. Ceiling: Gold medal. Expected: Bronze medal.

I am pretty optimistic in this assessment, I know. The draws will be huge, but I think our guys have trained well for this event. We tend to compete better when the competition is closer to home so hopefully London will be friendly.