Coming fresh off a weekend in which the MSU wrestling team dominated two teams, the Spartans are set to open their Big Ten season Friday night at Purdue.
The Spartans (2-1 overall, 0-0 Big Ten) were able to rebound over Lock Haven and Bucknell on the road and hope that momentum will continue when they travel to West Lafayette, Ind.
Senior 184-pounder Ian Hinton said the beginning of Big Ten play marks a shift in MSU’s attitude toward the season.
“This time of the year, we don’t like to overtrain ourselves as we’re getting into the meat of the season with Big Ten play,” he said. “But we can’t let ourselves taper off. We have to maintain a high level of competition.”
Head coach Tom Minkel’s squad is looking to improve upon last year’s performance in the conference in which the Spartans finished dead last in the Big Ten with a 1-8 record after getting off to an 8-1 start.
That team was marred by injuries to several key seniors, thrusting a number of younger wrestlers to step up and be slotted into the starting lineups.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a year like that,” Minkel, a 21-year veteran of the program, said.
However, the benefit of an injury-riddled season is that it allowed for the younger players to get some much-needed experience.
“Any time you compete, it’s good experience,” Minkel said. “No matter how it turns out, you learn from it. We had a lot of guys in the lineup who had a chance to get a taste of what big-time college wrestling is all about.”
In their match against the Boilermakers last year, the Spartans suffered a 22-9 beat down, in which only three Spartans came away with an individual win.
One of those wrestlers was Hinton, who took down A.J. Kissel, ranked eighth overall in the nation at the time. The other two wins came from senior 149-pounder Dan Osterman and senior heavyweight Joe Rizqallah.
Osterman recently dropped out of the top 20 individual rankings, from 18 to unranked, leaving sophomore heavyweight Michael McClure the sole Spartan still ranked, hanging in at number 13 in that weight class.
Rankings slight aside, Osterman said the Spartans will be getting a major test in the form of the Boilermakers, who are sitting just outside the top 25 in the polls themselves.
“We’ve got a tough Purdue team this weekend, and we just get to see where we’re at,” he said. “For me, that’s exciting (because) we can only go up from last year.”
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