Wattles 1-2 At Tourney

Heavyweight wrestler Kevin Wattles went 1-2 late last week as Harvard's sole representative at the NCAA wrestling championships in Iowa City, Iowa.

Wattles won his second-round match but lost his first and third contests. His 1-2 finish was good enough to place him between 16th and 24th in the field of 35 grapplers.

In the third round of his first match, Wattles was pinned by a wrestler from Oklahoma. He came back strong and returned the favor to a man from the University of Minnesota. In his third contest, though, the Leverett House senior was eliminated from the tournament by a grappler from West Virginia.

"The Oklahoma match could have gone either way," Wattles said. "The guy from Minnesota--I didn't know until afterwards that he had finished second in the Big 10, which is probably the toughest division in the country. And he was quite a bit bigger than me, so I was happy to beat him.

"I wouldn't say I wrestled well in the West Virginia match, but I wouldn't say I'm really upset with myself either," Wattles continued. "Sometimes you just get yourself into a situation where you can't get out--except by getting pinned."

After earning the second seed in the Ivies with his 15-4 regular season record, Wattles went 2-2 in the Eastern Championships. This was good enough to garner Wattles a berth in the NCAAs.