By Courtney Baumann
The Iowa wrestling team will continue its 19-day break from competition until it travels to Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois, on Dec. 29 for the first day of the Ken Kraft Midlands Championships.
The tournament will be the 54th of its kind, and the Hawkeyes have won the team title 25 times, including four of the last five years.
“Midlands has been around for a long time,” Iowa wrestling head coach Tom Brands said. “It’s a good tournament to get back into it, and the competition is good as well.”
Over the past few years, Iowa has seen competition from at least four Big Ten schools at Midlands as well as many other Division-1 schools.
Big Ten schools that have been known to compete at the Midlands Championships are Nebraska, Illinois, Purdue, Rutgers, Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and of course, Northwestern.
Since its inception, Iowa has competed at nearly every Midlands tournament, and the Hawks hope to take home the crown for the 27th time overall this year.
Brands is a big proponent of the tournament.
“The thing I like about it is that it’s a two-day tournament, with early morning weigh-ins. It mimics at least the Big Ten, and it mimics two-thirds of the national tournament,” Brands said. “The other thing it does is it gets you out of your holiday hangover, quick. We come back the day after Christmas, and we get back to work, then we leave on Dec. 28 for Evanston … It’s a good way to get right back into it.”
With only two days of practice between Christmas and the Hawkeyes’ departure for Northwestern, that “holiday hangover” Brands talks about needs to be nipped in the bud.
Junior 149-pounder Brandon Sorensen said he and his teammates know the importance of staying up on their training during the few days they have off.
“We’re still training through this week; we’ll have a little time off for Christmas and go see the family,” he said. “Then we come back and are right back at it.”
That time off won’t be very long for most of the Hawkeyes, though.
Senior Thomas Gilman said that most of the wrestlers who are from Iowa tend to go home for a couple of days before getting right back to Iowa City for training.
And that training isn’t any sort of break, either.
“It’s not like I’m going to go home for an extended amount of time,” Gilman said. “I might go home for a day or so, but I’ll be in here working out, pushing my conditioning, finding someone or calling people back into town for wrestling. Everything is the same. There’s nothing different.
“Just because it’s a winter break doesn’t really matter.”
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