OldGoatGrappler

2017 will be Bailey's year.

Don't forget about Guhl vs. Woods that came down to overtime in a very close match with an amazing finish.

i owe everyone on this message board an apology. I looked selfish and ungrateful last night. Being frustrated is no reason to act the way I did. I apologize and appreciate the support through out my careere. Thank you

Fantastic young man and great family.  Good luck blowing those wins away Evan!

Blake took care of business and dominated the interview speech too.     Congratulations and thank you for all the years of excitement.  Look forward to watching you dominate at the next level too.

No idea the average age but average grade level (two decimal points if applicable):
106-9.75
113-10.5
120-11
126-10.69
132-11.31
138-11.31
145-11.44
152-11.56
160-11.12
170-11.31
182-11.63
195-11.56
220-11.44
285-11.56

Please don't be on the same side of the bracket.Please don't be on the same side of the bracket.Please don't be on the same side of the bracket.

Brought to you by EI Sports
 

 
By JEREMY HINES
Thehines7@gmail.com
 
Indianapolis Cathedral’s Blake Rypel is one of Indiana’s most dominating forces on the wrestling mat. His name is recognized by just about everyone who cares even a little bit about the sport in the Hoosier state. Rypel wants more though – he wants everyone in the country to know his name.
 
“I want to be one of the most recognizable names in college wrestling as well,” Rypel said. “I want to be a four-year contender for the National Championship.”
 
Rypel, a senior at Cathedral, will wrestle next season for the Indiana Hoosiers. He currently is 34-0 this season and is riding an 80-match winning streak.
 
“Blake is the kind of wrestler that is tough to coach,” Cathedral coach Sean McGinley said. “He can do so many things that you really don’t practice. You kind of let him go on that. He’s so good on the mat, he’s teaching us in the room. He’s a very special wrestler.”
 
Last season Rypel was the state champion at 195 pounds. This year, in order to benefit the Cathedral team, Rypel has cut down to 182 pounds.
 
“Here’s a guy that is committed to IU,” McGinley said. “He’s a returning state champ. He’s ranked No. 1 in the state at 195 pounds. But he decides to drop weight and go down to 182 for the betterment of the team. That right there tells you what kind of kid Blake is.”
 
Rypel’s decision to drop to 182 was for the benefit of the team, but it was also to help out his good friend Ben Stewart.
 
“Ben is a football player,” Rypel said. “He wants to play in college and he wants to be bulking up, not cutting weight. So I said I would go down to 182 so he didn’t have to.”
 
Stewart is currently ranked No. 2 in the state at 195.
 
“If Blake doesn’t go down to 182, Ben doesn’t wrestle,” McGinley said. “So obviously his decision to drop has greatly helped our team.”
 
Rypel finished seventh as a freshman at 160 pounds. He was second his sophomore season at 182 and he won last year at 195.
 
His freshman year was one of his most trying seasons because his father passed away unexpectedly a few weeks before the start of the season.
 
“That was terrible,” Rypel said. “I used it as motivation though. I dedicated a lot of my wins to my dad. Every once in a while I start to dwell on his death, but I try not to.”
 
Rypel comes from a basketball family. His dad, brother and sister were all basketball standouts. Ironically, Blake was introduced to wrestling through basketball.
 
“My basketball coach at the time, I think it was around 2005 or 2006, had a son that wrestled and he told me that I might like it,” Rypel said. “The first year I thought wrestling was OK, but in the second year I really started winning and fell in love with the sport.”
 
Rypel is already focused on his college wrestling. He has dreamed of going to Indiana University ever since he was little, and he can’t wait to put on that Hoosier singlet.
 
“Every college I visited was pretty cool,” Rypel said. “But I already knew everyone on IU’s team. I have been a Hoosier fan all of my life. I never thought that one day I’d be good enough to wrestle for them.”
 
McGinley believes Rypel will have a lot of success in college because he is a dominating wrestler on top, which suits the college style.
 
As far as finishing his high school career, he said anything less than a state championship would be a disappointment.
 
Rypel won the Lawrence Central sectional last week, beating No. 3 ranked Cameron Jones 8-6 in the final.
 
He hopes Cathedral can also claim the team state championship. The Irish have seven ranked wrestlers still competing: Lukasz Waldensak (No. 13, 106), Jordan Slivka (No. 12, 113), Breyden Bailey (No. 2, 126), Zach Melloh (No. 6, 132), Rypel (No. 1, 182), Stewart (No. 2, 195) and Ryan Guhl (No. 9, 220).
 
“I really believe we have some of the strongest wrestlers in the state,” Rypel said. “As long as our guys can place, we have a real good shot at winning.”
 
Click here to view the article

Ryan Guhl over Walter Haire by fall @ 220

I think that football coaches could be a huge factor in remedying this whole situation. It happened at our school, it's all football all the time and to be fair most sports seem to follow that trend. If the football coaches would encourage their team to wrestle that would not only instill toughness and discipline but would also bring "the cool kids" to the party because let's face it wrestling is full of the most hard core rugged "individuals" that don't really care what other people think, which Will serve then well in life but to flood the room with #'s for the sport it's going to take recruiting from the football roster. We have a new head football coach that says that this is also his offseason goal, we will see. Wrestlers should also join the other school teams (except basketball) which would give the parents a chance to do a little networking as well.

Y2, moot if you don't have fresh data and no school sizes.

What are some possible solutions that could help us to have less forfeits?  We seem to do a real nice job pointing out problems, but don’t do as well with finding solutions. Here are a few possible ways that I see that could help with forfeits.
 
1.       Combine 106/ 113 into something like 110.  Then add in another middle weight.  That alone would solve some of the forfeit problems.
2.       Create/ push more groups like Beat the Streets.  By the looks of the forfeits there seems to be a problem getting wrestlers out in inner city schools, these programs seem like a great way to introduce wrestling into these communities.  I have a friend that coach’s baseball, and works with R.B.I and that program seems to be doing some good.
3.       Change the attitude about wrestling being an “individual sport”.  If the importance of the team is pushed more, then kids will work to get other kids out to help the team get better.
4.       Work the hallways.  There are very few kids at Churubusco Jr. Sr. High School that haven’t been told why they need to wrestle.  We go after them all.  We refuse to have forfeits too.  Our 106, 113, and 120 had never wrestled at all before this year.  They struggled a lot, but I am pretty sure all will come out again next year, and by the time they are seniors hopefully they improve to the point where they are pretty competitive.
5.       Change the culture with wrestling around your school.  This is difficult but can be done.  I was lucky enough to walk into a situation where we had a lot of talent, but not a ton of numbers, we had a pretty good wrestling culture to begin with though, and just tried to grow the team around that.  At team state I had a coach from Hagerstown comment about how Knightstown used to have like 6 kids, now they are at team state.  I remember when Central Noble had 3 kids in a dual against us, now they are a really solid 1A team.  Brownsburg has totally changed the culture there as well, again this is a really hard thing to do, but can be done.
6.       Have more “friendship duals” like the Adams, Wells county teams have.  I am sure there are similar events all over the state, but these seem like a good way to get more kids involved.  I have a lot of trouble getting the youth parents to spend the $15 for a weekend event, which they may get 2 matches at.  The friendship duals seem like a good way to get more kids involved at the youth level.
7.       Change the Uniform- I have a ton of kids that say they would wrestle if it wasn’t for the uniform. I think that singlet are cool, but it may be time to modernize the uniform, that may add a few kids.
8.       Provide more opportunity for JV tourneys- more matches, more importance, the more kids will wrestle.  There are a lot of ways to do this, I think some a lot of the changes that would help would come from changing our weigh-in points system.  That would have to come from the state.
 
Now a few things that I think hurt wrestling that I don’t know how to address.
1.       Sport Specialization- This is fascinating to me, because at small schools our kids are generally 2-3 sport athletes.  Wrestling is the 2nd or even 3rd most important sport for a lot of our kids.  There are still a number of athletes who just focus on one sport.  This annoys me to no end.  I think that would actually be a bigger problem/ annoyance at small schools. 
2.       It’s hard/ weight cutting- I’m not sure there is much you can do with these too.  As an athlete I always loved wrestling, but disliked what I felt was the monotony of practice.  As a coach I try to mix it up as much as I can to avoid some of these difficulties.
3.       Wrestling all day on Saturdays- this is a complaint I get a lot.  Not sure how to address it beyond changing out points system.  I also think that less 6 ways more quads would be something that could help this situation.  My kids for the most part enjoy rounds 1-3 on Saturday, tolerate round 4, and can stand round 5.  So if anyone is planning a quad next year let us know.

This is usually pretty telling of the "state of wrestling" here in Indiana. So here it is!
 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bt2uxpHPNLmdWOknWd_9So1K68Z6yYRbYCz69CcjhiU/edit?usp=sharing
 
 
 
Couple interesting stats
Only 10 1A teams have a full roster at sectional
Out of the 102 3A teams, there are only 90 forfeits with 62 teams having a full team

Clinton central is the team I noticed getting some curiously good seeds. In general, the seeding at many weights is borderline inexplicable. Great win/loss records don't mean much if they haven't wrestled competitive schedules. There will be a ton of "upsets" at this sectional

If school size is the biggest factor, shouldn't the largest school in the State forever (Carmel) produce the most champions?  Are they an EXTREME anomaly too?  Could it be that they focus on sports other than wrestling?
 
Carmel hasn't had a state champ for almost 20 years.  Carmel is far from the only huge school with dismal wrestling success compared to their size.
 
Just because cheese is round and the moon is round, doesn't mean the moon is made of cheese.

Usually you can just tell by the smell...at least that's how I know I'm in "da region."

Topic of a lot of contention in Northwest Indiana! Lake and porter counties are adamant that they are the only "region" schools, even Lake county schools often don't like to include Porter county schools in "da region". The sense is that the urban areas take it as a badge of honor that doesn't extend to the rural areas of southern Lake county and they would never include Jasper and Newton counties in the Region, but Wikipedia would disagree https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Indiana
If you include the entire 219 area code you greatly extend the size of the region. If you look at the region as the metropolitan areas surrounding The southside of Chicago you limit it to Northern Lake county. This could probably be a sociology thesis if someone really wanted to get into it

Ben Stewart Cath over Kolby Ferris HSE and Nick Shaeffer Westfield at NC Duals today at 195.

Do you think they might give ISSMA (the band league) a good deal too?
 

Comparison of B1G programs.  
 
Percentage of "in-state" wrestlers on their official rosters.
 
Graph available here:  https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipPi9jDRKMJC4FrccE7wDVGSfJAgFFjU3iu5sFbr
 
Northwestern 20.00%
Nebraska 25.71% Maryland 31.58% Michigan 47.22% Purdue 48.28% Iowa 54.05% Minnesota 55.56% Indiana 56.67% Wisconsin 56.67% Penn State 65.63% Ohio State 69.05% Illinois 79.31% Rutgers 82.14% Michigan State 90.91%

The stalling calls on Hwts kills me. We aren't stalling, just misunderstood! #FatsDontShoot

Parris born 10-1-99 turned 15 in October a real freshman.  The poor boy just getting hair under his arms!!!! lol

If anybody ever asks you why you are part of the wrestling family, just show them this story.