Wisconsin Grappler Blogs

By: Eli Felts
Date: 12-7-06

It’s been a busy couple of weeks since my first entry. Last week we wrestled UW-Steven’s Point and we competed at the MSOE Invitational. We lost to Point in a dual that was closer than the score indicated. We dropped a lot of close matches, and, as Coach DeRoehn keeps telling us, we are literally a few takedowns away from beating higher-ranked teams like Steven’s Point. We are getting compliments for hanging with the tough teams in the conference, but we aren’t satisfied with that. Our goal isn’t to just let the tough teams know we can hang with them; we want to knock those teams off and make our own reputation as one of those teams that is always at the top of the conference. So, we still have work to do, but we are definitely making progress. At the MSOE Invitational we placed second as a team, behind UW-Platteville. This Saturday we compete in Sheboygan against Lakeland College and MSOE in our last competition before break.
Personally, I have had a frustrating go of it lately. Against Point I bumped up two weights to fill in at 184 and lost 12-0. At the MSOE Invite I went 1-2. I was extremely disappointed with my performance. As a result, I was really looking to get after it this week and work on some of the mistakes I was making over the weekend but I got a skin infection so I have been out of the wrestling room all week. I absolutely hate not being in the room when my teammates are in there.
Right now, we are wrapping up our semester for school(I am writing this as a distraction from my homework). We have finals next week so we will be off of practice and after that most of the team will go home and practice with high school teams over the break. I’ve had a pretty good semester as far as classes go, but it will definitely be a relief to be done with classes for a while and be able to just focus on wrestling (and maybe some ice fishing).

The last week has been interesting to say the least for La Crosse wrestling. On Thursday, we suffered our first conference dual meet lost since 2003. There are no excuses to explain what happened in Platteville. They simply came out, wrestled hard and got the pins when they had the opportunities. Did we wrestle our best? No. Is this the line-up we will have at the end of the year? Probably not. But, that goes to show everyone that on any given night in the WIAC, if you don’t come out and wrestle your rear ends off, you could get beat.

Coach Malecek addressed some issues from Thursday night and stressed those to the entire team on Friday and throughout the day on Saturday. With that said, we got back on track a little bit at the Wisconsin Open at Parkside. In some areas we wrestled much better and improved from Thursday. In other areas we will continue to work and get back to basics. All in all, we were modestly impressed with what we saw from our guys on Saturday. We had great performances from Josh Chelf and Jason Lulloff to name a few. Chelf won the 174 bracket with four pins on the day, winning the “Most Pins in Least Amount of Time” award. Lulloff won the 184 bracket on his way to winning the “Sportsmanship” award. Congrats to those guys and check out the rest of the team’s results at trackwrestling.com.

As for myself, I did not wrestle this weekend. I have had some injuries in the last couple of weeks and with the advising of our athletic training staff and Coach Malecek, I rested my body for a couple of days. We have another conference dual on Wednesday and the St. Cloud Open on Saturday that I need to be ready for. Although it killed me to stand at mat side and watch my teammates wrestle, I know there that it was the best thing to do at this point in the season.

As anyone who has wrestled before knows, it only takes a couple of days to get out of shape. With that in mind, I went for a run this morning before the Packer game. I layered up with clothes, stocking caps and gloves. I did this not to shed pounds, but to keep from freezing to death. As I ran through downtown La Crosse with a towel pulled tight across my face and my stocking hat pulled down below my eyebrows, I was once again reminded of how crazy wrestlers are. I fed off the crazy looks and waves from people in their cars as they drove by. Wrestlers truly are a breed unlike any other.

Thanks for your time and interest in La Crosse wrestling. Please help spread the word about this website; they have a great thing going here. You’ll here from me again soon. Good luck to all teams competing this week.

Yours in Wrestling,
Ross Needham
157 UWL

Hey all wrestlers and wrestling fans-
First of all, I would like to thank WisconsinGrappler.com for putting this together. It is great to see WI college wrestling in the limelight. I hope everyone enjoys following along with all the teams and shows their support for all the guys who work so hard to compete in the world's greatest sport.

Secondly, welcome to the UW La Crosse wrestling blog. Both Jason Lulloff and myself will be posting throughout the season. We'll be letting you know what's going on with our team and give you a little peek in to the life of a D3 college wrestler.

And now onto the season thus far... I'm not going to go into the stats and records because you can look those up for yourselves by following the links on this site. I will say though, we have been competing for the past couple of weeks at opens and at a dual meet tournament in MI. It has been great to pound on someone else since we have been beating each other up since school started. We have had some ups (wrestling our style and beating top quality wrestlers) and downs (injuries), but we understand that we are running a marathon, not a sprint. We will be were we want to be when the time rolls around.

The biggest change so far this season is our new head coach. Coach Dave Malecek has been a much welcomed addition to the program. He has adjusted to us as much as we have adjusted to him. He has the right attitude towards training and wants to win now. I have never met someone so dedicated to the sport and to the success of his athletes. The future of the program is in great hands with Coach Malecek. Welcome to the Revolution.

Thank you all for reading the first blog entry from UW-L. We appreciate all your support. Stay tuned for more postings as the season rolls on.

Yours in wrestling,
Ross Needham
157 lbs. UWL

Our season has begun as we recently participated in the UW-Stevens Point Open and the Concordia Open. We wrestled pretty well in both of these tournaments. On Wednesday, November 29, we will be dualing Upper Iowa (ranked 8th in DII) at UW-Parkside. It should be a good dual. And on Saturday, December 2, we will be hosting the Wisconsin Open. There should be a lot of good competition there with around 300 wrestlers.

Date: 11/27/06
By: Eli Felts

So far this season has been going well. We’ve been practicing for about two months now. Our team has really come along way this year. We had a solid core of guys coming back from last year and we got a really good freshman class in this year. Our freshmen all have a great work ethic and they are a big reason that our program is starting to turn the corner. We have a full practice room now, which is a nice change from our thin numbers last year. There is a lot more competition in the room, as a lot of the younger guys are pushing the veterans, and it’s really showing with some of our early season results. We won our first conference dual, beating #25 UW-Platteville 26-19, and have had some solid showings in our first two tournaments. We’re starting to make some noise, and if we keep working the way we have been we’re going to keep being successful. It’s an exciting time to be a UW-Oshkosh wrestler!
Personally, I feel like I’ve come along way this season. I came to UW-O for the second half of the season last year. I wrestled 174 mostly, but I felt like last year I was really just knocking rust off and adjusting to college wrestling after being out of the sport for a year and a half. During the off-season, I worked very hard in the weight room and wrestling in preparation for my first full college season. This season, I dropped down to 165. I lost my wrestle off 5-4 to Kevin Luedtke, so I have only been wrestling in tournaments. It’s obviously disappointing to not be in the starting lineup, but I’m making the best of it. Kevin and I push each other very hard in practice and I think that having that competition every day is making both of us better. I feel like I’ve improved more in the first two months of this season, as a backup, than I ever have before.
Right now, we are just returning from Thanksgiving break. We had 4 days off of wrestling, which is by far the longest break we’ve had since wrestling started. I’m feeling very refreshed and I’m ready to get back to the grind! In the next couple weeks we will be competing and wrapping up the fall semester, so it should be a busy and exciting time.