Steve Smerz Quotations

He comes back and gets a pin, and that's (Matthews') first varsity match. I certainly didn't expect him to go out there and get a pin.

Our goal is to wrestle tough and try to earn some respect.

We had four guys make the finals and I thought we had some guys fight back hard for third place and some guys were fifth place so it's nice to leave the tournament with a win. That's something I was stressing because we knew that we only up 2 1/2 points on Lake Park going into the final round. We needed to get some wins and we did that.

We only had 10 guys wrestling and six of them made it to the finals. That's pretty good.

We only had nine guys entered and we got six through. Of course, it would have been nice to have gotten everybody through, but that's not bad odds.

Daniel and Cody (Crawford) have been big additions to our program (at 103 and 112 pounds) this year.

The nice thing is that they'll have a bye next week (in the first round) so they'll get to see who they will wrestle. They'll get to a little scouting, which is always nice. Plus, it's one less match you have to wrestle.

The guys we have wrestled hard all year and have really given the extra effort and looked to go for pins because we've been down points.

It was a tournament where if you won your first match, you moved forward. If you lost your first match, you moved back and the best you could finish was fifth.

It's been a great year. Dual meet-wise, we're 14-7, and really the only full lineup we've had was in the first meet of the year (against STC North).

I asked the ref if he (Andrew) had the leg hooked or not. He (the ref) said that he didn't so I said, OK, because if you get the leg hooked, you should get the takedown.