Trio of defending wrestling champs move down a class
DENVER — Sage Budd, Jimmy Fate and Seager Oliver found themselves in the same unique situation coming into this weekends state wrestling tournament. Each one of them is a defending 4A champion. This year, they’re all wrestling at the 3A.
Budd (Mead), Fate (Berthoud) and Oliver (Montezuma-Cortez) all wrestle at schools that dropped in classification for the 2014-15 school year. None of the wrestlers seemed to have any problems adjusting to the difference in classes as all three won their opening bouts and advanced to Friday’s quarterfinals.
“(I’ve noticed) there are different wrestling styles,” Budd said after his 4-0 decision victory. “Mostly during the season we wrestled 4A and 5A teams, so our schedule was pretty tough. The only time I had seen 3A was in regionals and some matches in between. The 3A wrestlers are no joke.”
As a defending champion, each wrestler knows they can’t take their competition lightly. But dropping in classification has given them a level of built-in confidence as they walked onto the floor at Pepsi Center.
And it showed when the whistles blew and their matches began. After Budd’s decision victory, Fate and Oliver both advanced via pinball.
“For me it gives me a little bit of confidence,” Fate said. “When your able to go out there with that level of confidence and the other guy doesn’t have it, it gives you an advantage. It let’s me wrestle my style and inflict my style on my opponent.”
And inflict his style he did. In his first state match in the 3A class, Fate pinned Mullen’s Dimitris Flores at 1:13.
The ease of the victories in no way reflects that these three wrestlers will just coast their way to another state championship. An enrollment cutoff in the offseason evened the playing field in terms of the number of schools that would compete in each class. Under the old rules, there would have been 38 teams competing in 3A. With the new cutoff, 53 schools now compete at the 3A level.
It might be easy to look at these defending 4A champions advancing with ease and simply point to them competing at a lower class. But the reality for them and countless other wrestlers is that the 3A became significantly more difficult.
“Compared to last year, 3A was weak as (heck),” Oliver said. “It wasn’t even. But now 3A is a lot tougher.”
But not tough enough to deter the three defending champions from 4A. All three will be back at Pepsi Center for the 10 a.m. quarterfinals session.
It will be the second-straight day in which the wrestlers have had to adjust to starting in the early session. They had previously started later in the day with the 4A and 5A groups, which go on last in the first two days.
“It was a little more hectic after weigh-ins,” Fate said. “We tried to get into our hotel and we couldn’t so we got here late and were scrambling to get ready. But we got a good warmup in, so it overall wasn’t too much of a difference.”
