The sun has just broken the horizon enough for one to see.
It is time to wake up; there is work to do.
Lifts for strength, practice for knowledge and repetition for success.
It’s an equation some call extraordinary and a task most don’t envy.
But for wrestlers, it’s simply typical.
There’s something rather atypical about this wrestling squad, though. Comprised largely of underclassmen, the ASU wrestling team is the pinnacle definition of underdog.
There couldn’t be a more accurate description. Left as beggars, athletic director Lisa Love and ASU athletics chose wealth over commodity, the bottom line over the competitive arena, when they cut the squad last May.
And yet the confidence of coach Thom Ortiz and assistant coach Al Fuentes would tell you a completely different story.
“Oh, we’re growing,” Ortiz said. “We grow every day. It’s about progress. We’re focused on the moment, focused on the process.”
To them it’s not about being underdogs or having to prove anything.
It’s about development and education.
But mostly, it’s simply about wrestling. It’s just like any sport at any level, with practices, workouts and meets or tournaments.
“We work out all the time. There’s so much preparation involved. You try [to] plan your day around it so that when the time comes you’re ready,” said freshman Kyle DeBerry.
DeBerry isn’t exactly the timid type. Fresh off his redshirt year, DeBerry has been asked to start every meet this season. So far, he’s 5-4, with three of the four loses coming to top-15 schools.
Prior to that, DeBerry’s wrestling experience consisted only of his time on the blue mats at Sunnyside High School in Tucson.
Like many others on this squad, DeBerry has been asked to help lead a wrestling team engulfed with youth, and it doesn’t seem that he’s had a very difficult time preparing himself.
“Before I go out there, I literally think in my head, ‘I want to kill this guy,’” he said.
But DeBerry is just a fraction of this story. Accompanying him is a host of other freshmen with names like Vicente Varela, Eric Starks, and Jake Meredith; from places like Rio Rancho, Battle Ground and Temecula.
There’s more, too. ASU wrestling has started as many as six freshmen in a 10-wrestler lineup. David Prado, Michael Swigart, and Te Edwards have also seen time.
Fresh off extermination, freshmen make up the measuring stick.
“Knowing that the program got dropped [and] knowing that we almost weren’t able to come here and wrestle, it makes you feel like you [have to] work harder and perform better,” said Meredith.
It’s not to say the stick is in any way short. The Sun Devils are 4-5 (2-1 Pac-10), with four of those loses coming to top-15 opponents. They’ve wrestled hard in every meet, winning team and individual battles along the way.
“I thought it’d take a lot longer for me to adjust to college wrestling,” Starks said. “I was [in] high school last year, and now I’m on the mats here.”
“It’s about experience,” Ortiz said. “There really is no wrong. We just work on better positioning to get them better. If we were more experienced, maybe we’d be more victorious in some of those matches. That’s not what matters; we have to focus on right now.”
Maybe that’s why — with the exception of its youth — it’s tough to discern a significant difference between ASU’s squad and any other.
“Sometimes you kinda psyche yourself out,” DeBerry said. “You hear Iowa, Iowa State and Minnesota, these top-tier programs, and you think to yourself, ‘Dang, how am I supposed to beat this kid from Minnesota or Iowa?’ But really, when you get on that mat, it’s just you and him. The score doesn’t mean anything at all.”
The young ASU team has competed with those top squads, working not on upsetting, but on arriving.
“All of this? It’s practice,” Ortiz said after a hard-fought dual against No. 9 Minnesota.
The team has practiced to get better and more experienced.
And the results are showing.
“They’re improving every time. Every day in every way, we try and get better, better, better,” Ortiz said. “As we move forward, we become more experienced. So that’s the key right now. I think we’ve lost a lot of matches based on experience.”
It’s not to say, that with this consistent demeanor and progression, that in a year or two the freshmen and two ranked sophomores (No. 6 Chris Drouin, 141 pounds, and No. 11 Anthony Robles, 125 pounds) who make up this team, will help it arrive.
That story still has to be written.
What can be written are stories of selflessness, or perhaps more appropriately, perseverance.
That perseverance, coming from a team that once wasn’t one, has come against many unlikelihoods in a sport with few breaks.
It’s out there on the mats on those ever-so-typical days. The days when the sweat drips rich, when the pain aches hard, and when the only thing that matters is wrestling.
“That and school,” joked Ortiz.
Typical.
Reach the reporter at joshua.spivack@asu.edu.
