Wisconsin Grappler Blogs

Hello everyone and Merry Christmas!!

The holiday season is always an interesting time for most college wrestlers. Many things are happening and changing. On the positive side, classes have come to an end. Studying is done and student athletes finally get a mental break from studying and taking tests. Also we get a chance to go home and spend time with our families, not to mention a chance to poke our faces in our old wrestling rooms. It is always nice to revisit the mat space that we once called home and lend our ex coaches a helping hand. The high school coaches seem to like having us, and we love sharing our experiences with them as well as getting a workout of our own in during their practice time. The best part of Christmas break is the presents and food!! Santa was very generous to me and so were all the people who cooked the meals I ate when I was home. This leads me to the negative side of Christmas break. Food!! It is everywhere. Chocolate, caramel, candy, cookies, pie, hams, potatoes, stuffing, and the list goes on and on.... With competition at the Midlands quickly approaching, it is important to steer clear of the junk food and eat in moderation (I am sure everyone at least sampled grandma's cookies, but moderation is key!!)

Over the break, it is important to get workouts in. Wrestling, lifting, and running are all things we need to do over the break. Although this type of thing seems like a pain in the hinder to the public, it really is not that bad. We find early morning runs in the cold to be rewarding when the people we know recognize us and wave happily as they drive to work. We really enjoy entering the local high school wrestling room in the evening and getting a workout in. It is an even better feeling when practice is over and everyone is heading to the locker room and we walk past it to the weight room. Some curious high schoolers follow to see what we are doing. As we lift it makes us feel good that these young men are interested in what we are doing. We feel like great leaders as we ask those watching to join us and put them through an extra workout. There is nothing better than doing our workouts knowing that someone is watching and learning. This type of situation is plenty of motivation for us college athletes to get good workouts in over holiday break.

For most of our wrestlers at UWL, the holiday break ends tomorrow. We continue to prepare for Midlands as we come back together as a team and practice. Hopefully we will represent Wiscsonsin wrestling well at this prestigious tournament. We look forward to sharing our results and thoughts with you in the future.

Merry Christmas -- I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season!

Jason Lulloff
UWL 184#

It seems like just yesterday we were going on preseason runs and meeting the new freshmen. And here we are, taking finals and getting some last workouts in before we head home for a little Christmas break. Wow, time sure does fly when you’re having fun.

Tuesday night we wrestled St. Point here in La Crosse. We had a fine fan turnout and they were rewarded with some good wrestling. There were some hard fought matches and thankfully we came out on top more times than they did. It is always great to wrestle Point. They are a well coached team that comes out and wrestles hard. We really tried to push the pace and go out fight for seven minutes. We did that to some degree, but of course we are not satisfied and will continue to work on it.

We don’t compete now until Midlands on the 29th &30th. This is a break from competition that comes at a good time for us. We are a little banged up at the moment, but nothing a little time, ice and rehab won’t fix. Of course we aren’t going to sit around and eat candy canes and watch Elf all day. We are studying hard for finals and planning our workouts around exams and study sessions. We are about to embark on the hardest part of our training and we can’t afford to slack now.

Early next week, most of the guys will be heading home. A lot of guys will be making their way to their old high school wrestling rooms and spending time with family and friends. With that said, I would like to wish everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday season. You can look forward to hearing more from the UW-L wrestling team in the New Year.

Happy Holidays,
Ross Needham
157 UWL

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