The Bobcats placed third overall at Saturday’s Navy Classic, putting seven wrestlers in the top-five of their weight classes with two champions.
After an eventful day in Annapolis, Maryland, that included three championship matches, two eventual champions and an incident where one Ohio wrestler was bitten by an opponent, the Bobcats finished third overall at the Navy Classic.
Improving on their sixth-place finish from last year, Ohio scored 105.5 points on Saturday and fell just three points short of the tournament’s winner, Chattanooga.
Ohio placed seven wrestlers in the top-five of their respective weight classes, with redshirt juniors Cody Walters winning the 174-pound weight class and Tywan Claxton winning the 149 class. Claxton extended his undefeated record to 12-0.
Coach Joel Greenlee praised Claxton’s competitiveness and said that he is not at all surprised by his undefeated start to the season.
“[Claxton] may not practice the best, but he competes the best,” Greenlee said. “He’s smart, he competes hard, he loves to win and he hates to lose. Every time the spotlight is on him, you’re going to get great results.”
Redshirt senior Harrison Hightower fell in the finals of the 165 class to Isaac Jordan of Wisconsin, but that was by far the least memorable match he was involved with on the day. In the second round of the tournament, he defeated Patrick Davis of George Mason after Davis was disqualified from the match for biting.
The other top-five finishers included junior KeVon Powell, who finished fifth in the 125 class, sophomore Noah Forrider, who finished fourth in the 141 class, redshirt junior Andrew Romanchik, who finished fifth in the 157 class, and redshirt junior Phil Wellington, who finished third in the 197 class.
Ohio will take a two week break from competition, but then will head to Boone, North Carolina, for a dual against Appalachian State on Dec. 5.
Greenlee says he is looking forward to getting out of the tournament format and he awaits what the upcoming duals have in store for him and his team.
“They’re fun, you have a lot of matches, but at the same time, I love to wrestle in the dual meets,” Greenlee said. “You play with your lineup to try to win the dual meet, you can really get your team fired up to wrestle in a dual meet. I can coach one guy against another. It’s hard to do that in a tournament when they wrestle four or five times in one day.”
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