Wrestling Club 03/18 Season Wrap-up

By Eddy Augustin

AMHERST, MA – Last fall, Amherst announced the return of wrestling to the college after a nearly 20-year hiatus. With that news came the hiring of head coach Eddy Augustin, who also works as the defensive line coach for the Lord Jeff football team. Despite wrestling still being in its infancy stage this second time around, Amherst made waves at the National Collegiate Wrestling Association Championships last weekend.

While Augustin was building the program from the ground up, a wrestling team will not be completely foreign to Amherst, which began featuring a varsity wrestling team in the late 1920s. Wrestling had a strong tradition at Amherst before competition stopped after the 1989-90 academic year.

“Wrestling has been a very important part of my life, so I’m excited to reunite the program with Amherst,” Augustin said. “Walking around Alumni Gymnasium, I see pictures dating back to the early 1900s and it’s obvious that wrestling was a big part of the Amherst tradition for a long time.”

In just the first season after returning to the mats, the Amherst had a pair of seniors earn All-American status this weekend at the 2009 National College Wrestling Association National Championships.  Those seniors were Guy Matisis (Hingham, MA) and Tim Rose (Richmond, VA), with Matisis winning Amherst’s first National Championship at 235 lbs. and Rose finishing as the national runner-up at 285 lbs.

Even as a club sport, Amherst wrestlers had the opportunity to compete at the national level thanks to the NCWA, which states on its website that  “many wrestlers are left to choose between continuing the sport they love and their first academic choice for schooling. The NCWA is designed to help solve this challenge.”

Both Matisis and Rose had plenty of wrestling experience coming out of high school, and each had the opportunity to take their game to the next level in college if they had wanted to. The pair chose Amherst in the end for academic reasons, and decided to focus on playing football for the Lord Jeffs, while pushing wrestling to the back-burner for the time being.

Matisis was thrilled  to have wrestling unexpectedly come back into his life during his final year at Amherst.

“I was waiting three long years for this opportunity,” he said.

Looking back, it is also very possible that Matisis was the very leader for a program that Amherst had been waiting two decades for.

Along with Rose, one of Matisis’ best friends over the last four years, Augustin and the seniors helped lead a group that had a wide range of wrestling experience to form a team this season.

 “To have the opportunity for a student to compete in wrestling for the first time, while on the other side we have guys competing for a national championship, makes for a very unique experience,” Augustin said. “It exemplifies the true nature of club sports.”

Just weeks after wrapping up his final season of playing football at Amherst, Rose switched his focus to wrestling.

“At first,” Rose recalled, “I used wrestling as a motivator to lose weight and get in shape, but coach Augustin kept talking about competing for a national championship. I thought he was just trying to motivate me at practice, and next thing I know, I won the Northeast Regional and my first two matches at nationals. It was only then that I realized I actually had a shot to win it all.”

Rose came up just short, finishing second to a three-time NCWA All-American in the championship match. Matisis was able to survive the bracket, and the nation's best club wrestlers, taking home a piece of hardware that will likely put Amherst wrestling back on the map. Augustin hopes that the team’s success at the national level will draw interest to the program from potential Amherst students, and from those who are currently attending.

No one will know how the team’s successes last weekend will impact the program for some time, but Lord Jeff fans can rest assured that the team is heading  in the right direction.