Penn State Wrestling 2018-2019

Great start for the Nittany Lions. RBY is the bomb. But he needs to control the emotions a bit at the end (I'll give him this one)

At 174, Mark Hall against Number 17 Ethan Smith. Hall gets a major, team score 18-2 (OSU lost a point for a late appeal).

At 184, Mason Manville against 1-ranked Myles Martin. (Shakur Rasheed injured?). Manville weighed in at 170. Martin gets major, Manville does his job. Team Score 18-6.

Bo knows

PSU dominates OSU, 28-9; GOPSUSPORTS write-up: gopsusports.com/news/2019/2/8/wrestling-no-1-penn-state-dominates-no-2-ohio-state-28-9-in-columbus.aspx

A Wrestling Story:

After last night's match, I was doing searches for interesting write-ups about the PSU victory. That led to searches on wrestlers and that went on until I learned that Bo Nickal won the Schalles Award back in May-June 2018. It's for the leading "pinner" for a season. Zain Retherford won in 2016 and 2017. Anyway, I saw Wade Schalles wrestle his last collegiate match. Here's a link to a Sports Illustrated story about Wade Schalles: www.si.com/vault/issue/43255/73 Wade wrestled for Clarion from 1971-74. Back then, it was a State College. In 1973, Clarion took three of the 10 weight classes at the Division I NCAA Championships.

Here's the story. At the 1974 Pennsylvania Conference Championships (for the state colleges), Schalles normally wrestled at 158-lbs and an outstanding wrestler from Bloomsburg, Floyd Hitchcock, wrestled at 177-lbs--everybody had Hitchcock pencilled in as the presumptive outstanding wrestler at the coming NCAA Tournament. For some reason which I can no longer remember, Schalles was ineligible for the Tournament. I don't know the reason, but Schalles decided to wrestle-up to 177 in order to meet Hitchcock. Before their match started, Schalles came on the mat and pointed to a spot about five feet from the center circle. Sure enough, Schalles pinned Hitchcock in the first period (at that spot), and back then, first periods were only two-minutes long (the 2nd and 3rd periods were three minutes long). And, a few weeks later, Hitchcock won the 177-lb championships at the Division II and Division I Tournaments and was selected as the Outstanding Wrestler in both.

So, that's who the Schalles Award is named after. He had 106 pins as a collegiate wrestler--and he impressed the hell out of Dan Gable. Being from another school, I thought Schalles was really cocky, but I was in awe of his skill and wish I had a video of that match.

That's quite a find Nyline. What he demonstrated in that match corresponded to what it said about him in the Sports Illustrated article and the two times I got to see him wrestle. I'm really loving getting back into following the sport--it's a bonus that PSU has established such dominance. Good times!

College wrestling: Weight-by-weight power rankings with conference tournaments just one month away:

www.ncaa.com/news/wrestling/wrestling-spotlight/2019-02-11/college-wrestler-rankings-penn-state-micic-Diakomihalis-Steveson