If you don’t frequent Team USA Wrestling’s YouTube channel you have been missing out. Last week, some of the country’s finest wrestlers all traveled to Fargo, North Dakota to take part in the High School National tournament. The Panthers had a couple recruits in action, with one of them bringing home some serious hardware (double finalist), and another who brought home some All-American honors. Here are some highlights:
How about starting out with freestyle national champion Adarios Jones. If you remember from yesterday, Jones was in the Iowa post falling to Hawkeye recruit Stoll in the Greco finals, but in this match he gets his own title.
Jones ran into a tough Sam Stoll in Greco (Stoll has done really well on the SENIOR level) so you can’t be disappointed in that finish. Bringing home double finalist honors is something to be really excited about and after a redshirt year, UNI could be looking at an upperweight who can do some serious damage in brackets come March.
My favorite UNI match of the entire Fargo weekend had to be when recent commit Bryce Steiert took on Padden Moore (who happen to be the Panther’s 165 starter – Cooper’s – brother). I am not sure why this match got me going, but something about watching the Waverly-Shell Rock wrestler go out and grind out a tough win was extremely satisfying, even if it did come at the expense of seeing another Panther’s brother take the loss. Steiert by the way just made another jump in Flowrestling’s rankings, this time he’s up to #7 at 160.
Max Thomsen had a rough weekend as he failed to place in the 145 bracket. I really don’t like to make excuses for losses, but 145 had to be one of the toughest brackets at Fargo in my opinion (and I think there would be quite a few who would share that opinion with me). I am not going to show a Thomsen win, but rather his loss to Mark Voss of Minnesota. If you want to talk about one tough wrestler running into another one too early in a tournament look no further (not to say I was upset with the bracket system Fargo used this year). Thomsen made the jump to 145 so you could probably even chalk up a little bit of the weekend to an adjustment. That being said Thomsen still looked pretty solid and hung in there with the other elite wrestlers in this weight class.
So far we have seen one of Schwab’s prized recruits from the 2014 class and two of the would be anchors of the 2015 class. I think looking at the results and watching these wrestlers, Panther fans should be feeling pretty good as it looks like Schwab won’t be content until he makes UNI a force to be reckoned with
[…] week we were able to look at videos from recruits going to UNI, ISU, Iowa, and the uncommitted group.Now we can take a look at which wrestlers have boosted their […]
[…] going through Iowa’s, UNI’s, and ISU‘s recruits that were participating in Fargo, I decided that I couldn’t leave […]