Feature: Hockey team faces wrestlers in ‘man-off’

It was the Orange against the Black this weekend. The men’s hockey team and the wrestling team faced each other in a “man-off” instead of practice last Saturday morning, with the hockey players dressed in orange and the wrestlers in black. After a series of strength and fitness contests, the hockey team took the title.

Hockey head coach Bob Prier teamed with wrestling head coach Chris Ayres to come up with the idea of the man-off. Nearly 20 men from each team battled it out for bragging rights.

In the first round, each team had to carry an assemblage of weights and a tire a mile around a track, after which they wheelbarrowed each other across the field and then lay in a “P” formation. The wrestling team gained a strong lead over the hockey team early in the race, but moving the tire proved to be their downfall.

“You’re only as strong as your weakest link,” Ayres yelled to his team.

Two men on each team rolled the tires at the back of the pack, while the rest of the squad carried 45-pound weights on their backs. The wrestling team’s troubles with the tire gave the hockey team a nearly 75-yard advantage when the wheelbarrow race started — a lead it maintained to win the first round.

“We are a team, and we have to work together to get things accomplished, but we’re not an organized group,” sophomore wrestler Brandon Rolnick said about the first-round defeat. “Whereas in hockey, it’s all about being a unit.”

In the second round, the teams competed at Princeton Stadium in a two-part contest. In the first section, players raced one-on-one up and down the stands; then, the contestants had to “bear crawl” to the 50-yard line. The winner in each head-to-head race won his team a point, and the first team to score 18 points total won.

The hockey team generally had a lead when it moved from the stands to the field, but the wrestlers closed the gap with a more agile bear crawl technique, giving them a slight edge over the hockey players in points.

At one point, freshman wrestler Jake Intrator was more than 20 yards behind his hockey opponent when he jumped onto the field, but through aggressive bear crawling, he caught and beat out his opponent with a dive over the 50-yard line.

When he was told that he had been behind before getting onto the field, Intrator was confused.

“I was trying to beat myself, not him,” he said. “Honestly, he was ahead of me?”

The score was 17-16 for the wrestlers when the last pair faced each other. With another point, wrestling could match hockey’s win in the first round, but hockey sophomore Matt Farris pulled ahead of his wrestler opponent to tie the round.

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The coaches decided to have the best man from each team go head-to-head to determine the winner of the round.

In the tiebreaker, sophomore wrestler Adam Krop went against hockey sophomore Kevin Ross. Ross gained an early lead in the race across the stands, but the less-winded Krop gained on him midway through. By the time they jumped onto the field, both men were drained, but Ross had a 20-yard lead. Krop narrowed the lead by more than 10 yards, but Ross held on for the win despite his flagging energy.

The hockey team now had an insurmountable two-round lead, but the next round was a buddy-carry relay in which the wrestlers excelled. A man on each team had to run the full field carrying a partner, and then the partner had to carry him back in a series of different carries. The wrestlers quickly gained a half-field advantage and then proceeded to extend their lead throughout the round. Two of the larger wrestlers, sophomores Ryan Callahan and Dan Santoro, furthered the lead to a full-field’s length. The wrestling team won the round, leaving the final score for the day 2-1 in favor of hockey.

Santoro is also a staff writer for The Daily Princetonian.

“It was the battle of the crazies,” said Ayres, “I guess they were crazier today.”

“You get a lot more out of it when you compete,” Prier said.

At the end of the day, Ayres said to the two teams, “This is a great example of guys getting tough and getting after it. We’re mad, though. We’re going to be out for a rematch at some point.”