SHS hosts college wrestling
Written by Maxime Roger, Former Student on Monday, January 13, 2014
With the beginning of the wrestling season at SHS, a college wrestling duel opposing the Doane College Tigers from Nebraska and Simon Fraser University from Vancouver was being held on Friday, November 22 in the SHS gym.
Before the match Head Coach Rob Zabel said, "[he was] very excited to have this college wrestling match at [his] high school.” It’s partially him who made this event happen: he knows the coaches of both teams, which both have former WESCO wrestlers, and Greg Eagle, a former SHS student and wrestler, wrestling for the Tigers!
Simon Fraser University has been wrestling for a long time and is competing at the D2 level, Doane College is a brand new program that was just brought back this year after having stopped for 30 years.
Zabel was not picking any side, even if he was hoping that Eagle will win his match. However, Zabel was “just excited to watch some good wrestling.”
Zabel was quite confident about the amount of people coming to the event. “My goal is a thousand people. That’s my target.” And there were indeed a lot of people present on Friday.
The match ended up a sweep of the American team by the Canadian one. The score at the end was about 44 to 0 for Simon Fraser, of which the first two wrestlers won with respectively a score of 17 and 19 points. The second match was stopped before the end because the Tiger wrestler who had three points on his counter would not have enough time to mark 16 points in such a small amount of time.
In the middle of the duel, very shortly after the 157 lbs wrestlers began wrestling, the Doane one unfortunately starting bleeding profusely from his nose. He tried to put a bandage on his nose and go back to his match but the bleeding would not stop and after more than ten minutes of courageously going back in the fight he was forced to abandon because of injury default.
The 174 lbs match went very fast, with a victory in one minute 44 seconds for the Simon Fraser wrestler. The Canadian team seemed unstoppable, and the American wrestlers could not do anything in front of these very good wrestlers who were enchaining victories.
None of the Tigers won a match, including former SHS wrestler Eagle, who lost his match with a score of 11 to 4 with the Canadian wrestler. Despite the strong support of his former school which gave him a short ovation at the announcement of his name and before his match, he was beaten by the 149 lbs SFU wrestler.
Eagle is described by his former wrestler friends as a “pretty good wrestler” and a “very hard working” person. Junior Peder Morill said “he used quick movements" and that he always did "what he needed to do.” Morill said that he had “faith in him that he’ll win his fight.”
Though the Americans suffered a defeat, this event was a great occasion to see two very good college wrestling teams.
