Wrestling: Kolodzik and Frey push wrestlers to 4th place in Keystone Open

On Sunday, the wrestling team battled in the Keystone Open, where they finished fourth ahead of several rival Ivy League teams, including Penn and Harvard. Both junior 125-pounder Garrett Frey and senior captain and 157-pounder Daniel Kolodzik made their way to the championship match of their weight classes, and six wrestlers finished in the top six of their classes. It was a resounding success for Princeton, which rebounded from losing their first two matches at the beginning of the weekend.

A week after opening their season with an impressive six placewinners at the Binghamton Open, the wrestling team took on both Rider and Big Ten-power Wisconsin in their first team matches of the season Friday night. Despite a few impressive individual performances in both matches, the Tigers (0-2) fell to both the Broncs (2-1) and the Badgers (5-0) at Rider’s Alumni Gym in Lawrenceville on Friday.

Highlighting Friday’s tri-meet for Princeton were the performances by Kolodzik. The senior was the only Tiger to win two matches, the first, a 13-5 major decision over Ramon Santiago of Rider and the second, a 7-5 decision over Wisconsin’s Shawn Perry. Kolodzik’s two victories accounted for a third of the entire team’s six victories Friday.

Princeton opened up the tri-meet against Rider, where they fell behind early. At 197 pounds, senior Kurt Brendel was pinned by Donald McNeil, then Tiger junior heavyweight Charles Fox lost a decision to Evan Craig. With the star Frey next in the lineup, the Tigers had hope to reverse Rider’s early lead, but Frey was caught and pinned by former New Jersey high school wrestling standout Chuck Zeisloft during the first period.

Just like that, Princeton was down 15-0 with Rider’s top two wrestlers, Jimmy Kirchner at 141 and #16 Jim Resnick at 174, still to come. In addition to Kolodzik’s major decision, freshman 133-pounder Chris Perez and sophomore 184-pounder Dan Santoro each won a decision over the remainder of the match, but the Tigers didn’t put nearly enough points on the board as they lost 29-10.

Kolodzik took some time between matches of the Keystone Open on Sunday to talk with the ‘Prince’ about the team’s performances over the weekend.

“We wrestled pretty poorly against Rider,” Kolodzik said, “but we came out against Wisconsin, who is much stronger and wrestled much better, so even in the time between matches we improved significantly.”

Indeed, the Tigers did look much stronger against the Badgers, especially considering that Wisconsin competes in the Big Ten, the nation’s strongest wrestling conference, and all but three members of the Badgers’ starting lineup are redshirted. Princeton stuck right with Wisconsin through most of the match. After dropping the first two individual matches, the Tigers dealt the Badgers their first blow when Frey beat Shane McQuade at 125 pounds. The victory was an important one for Frey, as McQuade would go on to pin Zeisloft of Rider later that night. Then sophomore Adam Krop won his match at 141 pounds to cut the Badger lead to only four points. Princeton junior Zach Bintliff lost a major decision to nationally ranked Cole Schmitt at 149, but then Kolodzik won his second match of the day to make the score 14-9. From there, however, it was all Wisconsin. Two of the three remaining matches resulted in pins for the Badgers as the Tigers lost 29-9.

Reflecting on the weekend, Kolodzik explained that the Tigers’ success will depend on how quickly the younger Tiger grapplers can adjust to college wrestling.

“The team needs to do a lot of growing up really fast,” Kolodzik said. “We’ve got a lot of young guys figuring out how college works.”

Of the underclassmen, Kolodzik mentioned both Perez and Krop as two Tigers who are showing promising signs.