By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE – With hours to go until the 165-pound final, University of Virginia wrestler Justin McCoy sat back and watched his teammates try to salvage something positive from what had been a disappointing day for them at John Paul Jones Arena. What he saw inspired him.
“It was like back-to-back-to-back-to-back wins, over and over again,” McCoy said. “It was awesome to see that.”
At the ACC Championships, Virginia sent five wrestlers to the semifinals. Only one of them, McCoy, advanced to the finals. But on a day when NC State captured its fourth straight ACC title, the Cavaliers pulled themselves off the mat and stormed through the wrestlebacks.
By the end of the consolation finals, 125-pounder Patrick McCormick, 141-pounder Dylan Cedeno, 157-pounder Jake Keating, 197-pounder Jay Aiello and heavyweight Quinn Miller had each placed third, and 133-pounder Brian Courtney and 184-pounder Michael Battista had won fifth-place matches.
All seven of them earned automatic berths in the NCAA championships, which starts March 17 in Detroit, as did McCoy, a redshirt junior who fell in the 165-pound final Sunday night. Moreover, UVA head coach Steve Garland hopes 149-pounder Jarod Verklereen will receive an at-large invitation to the NCAA meet.
Only once in program history have the Wahoos sent more than eight wrestlers to NCAAs.
“That’s what it’s about,” Garland said. “It’s about getting as many guys to the show as you can.”
The semifinal round started poorly for UVA, when McCormick lost by major decision at 125 pounds. Then Keating, the No. 2 seed at 157 pounds, was pinned in the first period. After the third-seeded McCoy prevailed at 165 pounds, where he avenged his regular-season loss to NC State’s Thomas Bullard, Aiello lost a close match to Pittsburgh’s Nino Bonaccorsi at 197. Finally, at heavyweight, the fourth-seeded Miller fell in overtime to top-seeded Nathan Traxler of Virginia Tech.
That was a serious momentum swing in the wrong direction for the Hoos.
“You could definitely feel it,” said Aiello, a graduate student who won the ACC title at 197 pounds in 2019-20. “You see Jake lose like that, in a funky position where he ends up getting pinned, and obviously I’m a guy that people look to as well, and I dropped the match, and Quinn also drops a match. It’s hard to come back from that, for sure.”
After the semifinal round, Aiello said, Garland met with the team “in the locker room and kind of challenged us. He said, ‘When your back’s up against the wall, you show who you really are.’ One of the themes we talked about [heading into the tournament] was adversity, how we’ve dealt with it this year, and how in the face of adversity we have continued to grow and continued to push through it. It just a great theme for this tournament because if you watched it, we faced a lot of adversity in that early round and pushed through it. Our back was up against the wall, and we showed what we were really made up.”
The team met again after the consolation finals, Garland said, and “I told them, ‘Guys, we went from having one of the worst rounds that I can remember to coming back and having just about as amazing a couple rounds as you can get.’ ”
At 141, the fifth-seeded Cedeno clinched a berth in the NCAAs by upsetting No. 2 seed Kizhan Clarke of North Carolina 5-0 in the consolation semifinals. In the third-place match, Cedeno knocked off Virginia Tech’s Collin Gerardi 7-5. Gerardi had edged Cedeno 1-0 in the first round Sunday.
“Wrestling is so mental,” Garland said. “Dylan gets this huge win over [Clarke], one of the best guys in the whole country. So all of the sudden he’s got confidence again. He’s lost to [Gerardi] twice, and he goes out and beats him. It’s amazing.”