Wrestlers Start Well, But End Year On Back

Ask any member of the Harvard wrestling team how his season went, you might get a confused look and a curt reply; "Which season?"

Few times in Harvard's long sports history has a team had as dramatic a mid-season turnaround as the 1993-94 grapplers.

And, fortunately, there have been even fewer times when a team has had the same kind of turnaround as the wrestlers had--a drastic plunge from success to hard times.

The Crimson went 7-4 through its first 11 meets, only to lose its last six by wide margins.

"All in all it was a rough year," senior tri-captain Steve Aoki says. "We were going well for a while, and then everything seemed to go wrong. It was a pretty bad finish."

Pretty bad indeed. Of all the things that went wrong for the team, two stand out.

First, the level of competition improved considerably. Gone were the Boston Colleges, Wagners and Bridgewater States that constitituted the first half of the team's schedule, and in were such powerhouses as Rutgers, Cornell and Seton Hall. The team's schedule was as bottom-heavy as a 1920's pin-up model.

And second, the Crimson were plagued by myriads of injuries. Tri captains Aoki, John Drosos and Bill Counihan--arguably the three top wrestlers on the team--were, among others, all out with physical maladies at critical points in the season. The team was never able to regain its flow and put forth its best foot in meets where nothing less was even close to acceptable.

"It was really a combination of things," Aoki says. "It would be nice to go back and see how well we could do if even some of those things didn't go wrong."

The season started out on promising note as the Crimson took two of four matches at the Harvard Invitational on December 11, beating Wagner, 38-6, and UMass-Lowell, 36-13.

Things continued on the right track after winter break, as the team got on a successful streak at home. The squad swept Bridgewater State and Boston College on January 12, and then, after a close loss to East Stroudsberg, beat Princeton and Boston College.

But a scary omen for the remainder of the season came in the team's last home meet, a quadrangular with Penn, Albany and Rutgers on February 5.

The squad was thrashed by the Quakers in the first match, 33-7, tiptoed past lightweight Albany, 25-18, and then was crushed by powerful Rutgers, 40-0.

The rest of the season was all downhill, as the team took to the road. In quick succession, the squad fell at Columbia, 26-15, at Cornell, 40-0, at Boston University, 22-12, at Brown, 24-12 and at Seton Hall, 30-9.

The team then placed 12th at the Eastern Championships at Cornell on March 4-5.

"When it came down to the end, it seemed like just abut everything went wrong," Aoki says. "In addition to injuries, we had people who didn't make weight, and a bunch of little, individual troubles like that."

Of course, any season has its highlights--particularly one which starts off so well, and in the case of the Crimson, most came from individual performances.

In particular, the tough, gusty wrestling of Drosos and Aoki stood out.

Drosos amassed a 10-2 record in the 177-pound division and a 3-0 record at 190 pounds. At the lighter weight, he finished second at Easterns and participated in the NCAA championships, although he failed to place there.

Aoki garnered a 12-4 record at the 126-pound category, a fact made all the more impressive considering that he wrestled injured for about half of the season.

In addition to those heroic performances, were the performances of a bevy of faceless freshmen and sophomores who had the task of picking up the team's slack shoved at them at various points in the year.

Although the results of their efforts weren't evident in wins and losses, they should be more obvious over the next few years.

"One of the things about this team was that we had a lot of young people who stepped up for us," Aoki says. "They got a lot of experience, and I think that it will be a lot more fun to wrestle for the team in the future."

WRESTLING

Record: 7-8-1

IVY League:1-4

Key Players: John Drosos (13-2), Steve Aoki (12-4), Brendan Counihan (8-8)

Seniors: Steve Aoki, Zach Cooper, Bill Counihan, John Drosos, Ron Mitra