Schedule shortened
Lehigh University team will have fewer matches as it copes with COVID-19
Not long ago, Lehigh University and the rest of the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association members announced a tentative, abbreviated 2021 schedule that doesn’t even call for a full round-robin within the league.
But after dealing with a series of frustrating starts and stops, Lehigh coach Pat Santoro will take what he can get.
His Mountain Hawks open a schedule consisting of eight dual meets beginning Jan. 2 at home vs. Hofstra. A possibility exists for some extra competitions to be added. But it’s just as likely that some meets will be canceled due to positive COVID-19 tests.
All of the open tournaments, such as the Southern Scuffle and The Midlands Championships, are prohibited by the NCAA, the EIWA does not allow overnight travel and the Big Ten is limiting competitions to conference opponents. Hence, no match with Penn State this season, and no road trips to Oklahoma State or Arizona State, which Le high would have made ina normal season.
In addition, the Ivy League members of the EIWA (Penn, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Harvard) have elected to cancel winter sports this season.
Don’t count on Lehigh being in midseason form for their opener, either, Santoro cautioned. Not only did Nick Farro, who would have been a fifth-year senior, elect to end his wrestling career and start graduate school, but Josh Humphreys is out for the season with a knee injury. Farro enjoyed a breakout season in 2020, finishing second int he EIWA Championships at 133 pounds, while Humphreys won his second straight EIWA crown at 157.
Many of those who are healthy won’ t be in top shape because of how little they’ve been able to practice.
“We’ve hadalot of interruptions in our training,” Santoro said. “We didn’t see them from March until September, before wecould get on the mats with them. Andthenafter three weeks [Lehigh] shut down for five weeks, so we couldn’t do anything with them.
“Thatwasprobably the toughest part for everybody because everybody got excited — around that third week, westarted looking like we wanted to look a little bit and then wejust got shut downfor five weeks.”
Though the wrestling team was healthy at the time, the whole campus shut down because of mostly non-athletes testing positive. Since their return, Lehigh has been at significantly less than full strength because of various wrestlers ruled out due to contact tracing.
“At onepoint, wehadlike15guys out,” Santoro said. “Andif someone feels sick, even if they don’t have it, they sit until we get the tests back. So wehaven’t had a full room at all this year.”
Asaresult, someoftheir competitions will be tweaked. Theopener vs. Hofstra, for example, won’t consist of the usual one bout at each of the 10 weight classes. There will be more.
“They’re in the same boat we are,” Santoro said, “so we’re going to try to mix and match as best we can. So instead of doing a dualmeet score, we’re just going to try to get everybody a match or two that day.”
The following Saturday, when they travel to Pitt, that dual meet will feature some add-on exhibition bouts just to get wrestlers some extra work.
Conditioning will be a challenge throughout, because they had to start much slower than usual.
“Wrestling is one of those sports where if you do it too much or too little, you’re prone for an injury,” Santoro said, “so we really tried to bring them back slowly. We did a lot of sparring when we came back, probably play wrestling and just tried to get somevolumeinand get their timing down. Andthenwe started slowly moving into live.
“We’re not where we need to be and ... we still have guys who haven’t certified yet because they’ve missed time.”
Even if the Mountain Hawks peak by the start of the postseason tournaments, teams like Army and Navy will have an advantage because they’ve been in a bubble the whole time, with little or no disruptions to their routine.
But limited wrestling is better than nothing. And at least Lehigh has that.
For now.