What started as a season marked with youth and questions ended as a successful campaign for Oregon wrestling.
Coming into the 1999-2000 season, Oregon wrestling was at a crossroads. The year before, the Ducks were forced to field many upsets because of injuries and off-the-mat problems before ending the season with a 4-10 dual-match record.
But that was last year. Head coach Chuck Kearney and his team said they forgot about all the distractions of the previous season and set their goals for the new one.
Many of those goals were met, Kearney said.
His team posted a much improved mark of 11-6 in dual matches and sent three competitors to the National Championships.
“I feel real good about it,” Kearney said. “We had some young wrestlers who made some phenomenal gains. One of the bench-marks you look at as a wrestler is getting 20 wins in a season and we had a bunch of freshmen do that.”
Some of the newcomers that impressed Kearney and his staff were freshmen Jake Leair, Eric Webb, and Tony Overstake, along with sophomore Eugene Harris.
Leair, a true freshman, boasted a season record of 20-15, tied for the third-highest win total on the team. Kearney points to his success as one of the biggest improvements on the team.
Webb, who tied Leair in wins with a 20-12 record, was another bright spot for the team. Junior-college transfer Eugene Harris was second only to Doug Lee in wins at 23-11 and made his first appearance at the National Championships.
“You can’t say enough about the strides that Eric has made,” Kearney said. “Eugene also did a good job for us. You look at all those guys as first-year guys and they did a great job for us.”
One person that Kearney and his staff needed to continue his great wrestling is Doug Lee. The two-time Pacific-10 Conference champion and All-American turned in what has become a typical season for him, posting a 27-3 record and going undefeated through 17 matches.
Lee’s leadership helped some of the younger grapplers perform at a high level all season, allowing the Ducks to win matches that they probably should not have won. Two victories in particular were wins over Fresno State (ranked No. 25 at the time) and Brigham Young.
“One of the things that great teams do is win matches that they shouldn’t,” Kearney said. “We had at least two of those this year. Against BYU, Doug steps up and gets a technical fall, Eugene gets a pin,” Kearney said. “And against Fresno State, top to bottom, our kids came out and lost only two individual matches. Those were our signs that we are on our way.”
At the Pac-10 Championships, Oregon had a hiccup along the road to becoming a great team. The Ducks could have sent five or six wrestlers to nationals, but only three qualified to go.
“Our guys wrestled at Pac-10s and we had flashes of brilliance,” Kearney said. “But at tournament-time you can’t have physical or mental lapses. It is hard to fault them because they worked so hard. Brian Watson misses six weeks and comes back and loses at the end in the finals on tie-breaker. In Eric Webb and Tony Overstake, if we could re-wrestle six seconds between the two of them, we’d have two more qualifiers.”
The Ducks made some big strides this season, and with senior Chael Sonnen returning from his stint with the Olympic team, the Ducks will be poised to make a run at the conference title.
“We want to be in the title-hunt here in Eugene,” Kearney said. “Instead of one All-American, we want four or five kids placing, which would give a top-ten position at nationals.”