Jeff Chaney
Sports Scene
ST. LOUIS – For the second straight year, something wasn’t right for Cam Simaz as he began his quest for a national championship.
The Cornell senior wrestler was off, feeling heavy legged and sluggish. It was the same problem that plagued the 197-pounder at last year’s finals, and was a factor in Simaz falling short of his ultimate dream.
So dealing with that feeling and picking up two wins in day one, Simaz decided to change up his routine.
“I cut down on my warmup time,” Simaz said. “I started taking two or three ice baths a day, and that seemed to cure it up a little bit.”
It worked, as Simaz marched through his quarterfinal and semifinal matches on Friday, followed by winning that elusive national championship Saturday night in front of a record-setting crowd at the Scottrade Center with a 7-5 come-from-behind win over Edinboro’s Christopher Honeycutt.
“I felt great on the stage today in front of everybody,” said Simaz, a former three-time state champion at Allegan High School. “That might have just been the excitement, but I think the ice baths helped. I hardly warmed up, I just hit like three shots and said let’s go win a title, and we did, so it worked.”
Simaz now becomes the Cornell’s 11 th wrestler to win at least one national championship, and the fourth four-time All American. He took eighth as a freshman, and third his sophomore and junior seasons.
This year he finished with a 31-1 record and moved into second place in career wins with 145-20 overall record in his four years on the Ithaca, N.Y. campus.
His only loss this year came as an injury default. He pulled a hamstring in November, an injury that had Simaz seriously considering to take a medical red-shirt this year.
But he didn’t, and right after Christmas, got healthy and back to working for what he accomplished Saturday night.
“This was a perfect ending to a perfect college career,” Cornell assistant coach Damion Hahn said. “We had a gameplan for Honeycutt, and he went out and did it. He has a great blast double, and our plan was to keep a hand on him and keep our distance.”
But Honeycutt, who came into the finals with a 40-1 record and the second seed, wasn’t going to make things easy for top-seeded Simaz.
Honeycutt scored the first takedown, and after a reversal in the second period, was up 4-1.
“I’ll be the first to tell you that the plan wasn’t to go out there (and get down),” Simaz said. “But the gameplan was to go out and wrestle hard for seven minutes.”
Wrestling hard to the end has been a Simaz trait ever since his days at Allegan, and Hahn knew that, and wasn’t worried that his star wrestler was down in the biggest match of his life.
“The third period is Cam’s period, and he proved that today,” Hahn said. “He never stops, he wears his opponents down, he’s been doing that since he got here. So I wasn’t concerned.”
Cam did prove that, as he scored a second period takedown to tie the score at 4-4 heading into the third period, and won it with an escape and takedown in the third.
“I’d like to think maybe in the second period things started working better,” Simaz said. “I just thought I’d go back to my offense, try to score some more. Luckily I had seven, he had five.”
Simaz’s championship capped a big night for the Big Red. He was the third Cornell wrestler to win a title.
Junior Kyle Dake won his third national championship when he won the 157-pound title, and senior Steve Bosak won his first, winning the 184-pound title.
For Simaz, Bosak’s win was just as exciting as his own.
“Bosak, he’s my number one partner, I love the kid to death,” Simaz said. “I was probably more excited to see him win his title than me, even though it might not have looked it. I was pretty excited for myself, but when Bosak won, I was in the back, in the shadows, going crazy. But I knew I had to stay calm for my match.”
The three championships helped Cornell end up in fourth in the final team standings with 102.5 points.
Penn State won its second straight national championship with 143 points. Minnesota was second with 117.5 points, while Iowa was third with 107.5 points.
“This was suppose to be a rebuilding year, and we had three titles, three champions,” Simaz said. “That’s pretty impressive. I couldn’t be more proud of this team.”
Simaz, who is majoring in economics, says he plans to stay with the program and help coach.
He’ll get a chance to work with two Michigan state champions, as his younger brother Taylor Simaz, and Lowell’s Gabe Dean, are both signed on to be Big Reds next year.
Both were in attendance this weekend to start working on their dreams of making it to the top of the NCAA Division I podium.