Sometimes in sports, the final score doesn’t tell the entire tale.
Oregon (9-6, 0-3 Pacific-10 Conference) won five of nine matchups against Northern Colorado on Friday night, including redshirt freshman Charlie Alexander’s nail-biting win over one of the top heavyweights in the country. Ryan Dunn, Zack Frazier, Joey Lucas and Ron Lee all won their matchups, including Lee and Frazier pulling out victories a weight class higher than usual. Lee also pulled out one of his biggest wins of the season.
But in the final score book, Northern Colorado (3-4, 1-0) walked out of McArthur Court winners of the dual meet, 18-16.
“We got some great performances,” Oregon head coach Chuck Kearney said in an Oregon press release. “Our guys were willing to wrestle different classes to try and win it. Our wrestlers competed hard, and the size disadvantages really only showed in the narrow matches that we could have won.”
A total of five Ducks wrestled up a weight class in a match where a fully healthy Oregon roster might have taken a win from the Bears. Oregon’s wrestlers mentioned during the week leading up to the meet that, though difficult, wrestling in a higher weight class and stepping in for injured teammates was a sign of the Ducks’ strength as a team. Besides wrestling up, Oregon was also forced to forfeit the 125-pound weight class match.
Coach Kearney said during the week that the team was shorthanded at the 184-pound weight class. The usual 184-pound class wrestler, sophomore Brysen French, is currently out injured, so redshirt sophomore Ron Lee stepped up from his usual 174-pound weight class to defeat Northern Colorado’s Vincente Mendez. Lee cruised to a 10-4 lead in the first period of the match and didn’t look back, winning an 18-4 major decision, equalling his highest match point total of the season.
Sophomore Zack Frazier stepped up to Lee’s usual spot at 174 pounds and won his match against Ryan Johnson, 8-5. Frazier was tied going into the third and final round of the match, but with less than 1:22 left scored on a reversal to take the lead. A takedown with less than 10 seconds sealed a win that the sophomore attributed to his teammate’s help.
“Ron had wrestled my guy earlier this year and gave me some advice,” Frazier said.
It was the redshirt freshman heavyweight Charlie Alexander who scored the night’s final victory for the Ducks. Facing off against Northern Colorado’s Reece Hopkin – ranked in the top 20 for his weight class nationally going into Friday night’s dual meet – Alexander took his 13th dual match win of the season, tops right now for the Ducks. Alexander and Hopkin had already faced off once this season, and the freshman learned from mistakes he made in the prior match to turn the tables this time.
“I had wrestled poorly last time we were at home, so I wanted to come back and start fresh and fix some things,” Alexander said. “I’d lost to him this year when he had wrapped up my legs in the second period so I wasn’t going to let him do that again. I could tell he was getting frustrated in the third period so I used that to my advantage and kept going.”
Oregon will take to the mat again this Friday afternoon at 4 p.m. when the Ducks host Cal State Bakersfield in a Pacific-10 Conference matchup.
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