After breezing through three of its four matches the previous weekend, the Boston University wrestling team had to work for every point on Saturday in a 20-17 win over East Stroudsburg.
Junior Jose Leon and freshman Joseph Rivera gave the Terriers an early cushion that they would eventually squander. Leon recorded his sixth pin of the season in the opening match and Rivera won a 5-1 decision in the 133-lb. class.
The Terriers would lose four of the next five matches and would find themselves down 14-12 with three contests to go.
Junior Ali Abri put five points on the board for the Terriers with a 25-12 major decision that regained the lead for his team. This time BU would hold on by splitting the final two decisions.
“I knew it was going to be a tight match going in,” said BU coach Carl Adams. “They have a good team.”
Adams said one of the keys was getting extra points from Leon’s pin and Abri’s major decision. East Stroudsburg, on the other hand, was not able to score any pins.
Though the Terriers appear weaker in the middleweight classes, Adams was encouraged by some of the performances from those wrestlers on Saturday.
One of those performances came in the 174-class, where senior Bryon Nelson held his own throughout the match, but ended up on the short end of a 6-5 decision.
Adams also admired the job done by sophomore Daniel Zoppo, though he lost a 20-5 major decision that pulled East Stroudsburg within one. It was Zoppo’s first match of the year, as he took the place of fellow sophomore Ben Schilens, who usually wrestles in the 165-class.
“He wrestled one of their best guys,” Adams said. “It was tough for him.”
The key match in East Stroudsburg’s mid-meet run may have been the battle in the 157-class.
The Warriors had gone pointless in 15 minutes of competition until Matt Dudeck was able to score two points to send his match with BU sophomore Leighton Brady into overtime. Dudeck scored a point in the second overtime to give him the 3-2 win.
But the Terriers’ heavier wrestlers proved to be too strong for East Stroudsburg. Abri’s major decision and junior Chad Grant’s 9-2 win in the 197-class gave BU a 20-14 lead heading into the last match.
The Warriors needed a pin in the heavyweight match to tie, but Terrier junior Ed Strauss managed to hold East Stroudsburg’s Marc Bauknecht to a 4-0 decision worth just three points. Strauss wrestled well, considering Bauknecht outweighed him by more than 80 pounds.
Adams dismissed the idea the team might have been a bit fatigued after wrestling in four meets the previous weekend.
“It’s not that we were real tired or anything,” he said. “We were just a little flat.”
The schedule remains rigorous for the Terriers, who host Rider University on Friday and Harvard University on Saturday, both at Case Gymnasium.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
