Some home cooking may serve the Ducks well this weekend.
It has to be something that can only help the Ducks as they head into their first home weekend wrestling matches in more than a month.
Oregon enters Friday’s contest against Fresno State and Sunday’s contest against No. 21 Cal State-Bakersfield with some momentum.
“We probably had our best performance on the year,” Oregon head coach Chuck Kearney said about the Duck’s performance in the Aggie Open a week ago. “We were taking chances because we were having fun.”
Oregon isn’t coming off a recent win. It has only done that once this year, against Army. Oregon proceeded to drop its next two matches after its first win of the season.
In all fairness, though, Oregon hasn’t really wrestled at home. One could count the match against No. 1 Oklahoma State as a home match, but that was against an exceptional team early in the season.
The Ducks haven’t used many excuses this year. They could have. They are 1-7 overall and 0-3 in Pacific-10 Conference play, which has them searching for that first league win.
Injuries and the redshirting of key contributors from a year ago have limited the team’s progress and made it nearly impossible to see it at its full strength. Yet the Ducks never dwell on or acknowledge those very facts. It’s all about the performance on the mat.
This time the performances will be in front of family and friends at McArthur Court, friendly to all who call it home.
“What we want to have happen is we want what happened (in the Aggie Open) to spill into competition in practice and into this weekend,” Kearney said. “We will need to have our ‘A’ game to compete with Fresno State and Cal State-Bakersfield.”