While other Ohio Valley Conference schools are concentrating on basketball, swimming, or indoor track, the Panthers have one other sport on their mind.

Eastern is the only school in the OVC to actually have a NCAA wrestling program.

Being the only team, finding competition of the same school size can be difficult. This is why head coach Ralph McCausland adopted a different strategy to facing schools.

“It’s just kind of been my philosophy over the years that (if) you’re going to compete at the national level you need to be exposed to national level competition,” he said.

Already the team has faced No. 8 Northwestern in a dual meet and 11 (Missouri, Minnesota, Oklahoma State, Iowa, Iowa State, Oklahoma, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan State, West Virginia) of the top 20 schools in tournaments.

McCausland said his reasons for facing so many of the top teams is to show his players what will be at the national level so there are no big surprises.

“Sure, you like to get some wins under our belt, but you know when we go against Indiana I think they’ll be 10th in the country,” he said. “We still have Central Michigan which might be as high as eighth in the country. We could shy away from that and go to a lesser competition but don’t want to.”

Junior wrestler Greg Perz also thinks the tougher competition is better to face instead of weaker teams.

“It always helps to go against the best guys in the nation to see where you’re at,” he said. “The only way to get better is to wrestle good competition. It’s not going to help beating on a bunch of bad kids; it helps to wrestle the good kids.”

Multiple teams the Panthers face come from the Big Ten conference. Out of the 11 schools located in the Big Ten, Eastern faces eight of the teams, including Purdue.

“We’re in the middle of the Big Ten. If you draw a four hour radius around here, you got Purdue, you got Northwestern, you got Iowa, and you got Illinois,” McCausland said. “You go another hour you got Michigan and Eastern Michigan. If you go a little bit southwest you got Missouri, which is the #1 ranked team in the country this year, but we don’t have them on the schedule. We have for the last 10 years.”

Jessie Reyes, the head coach of Purdue, said the stats do not give any indication of how close the meet was and the amount of fight the Panthers put up.

“They came out and competed hard,” Reyes said. “It’s just that where we were favored we capitalized. Where they were supposed to win at 174 and 184 they did really well and won some extra points.”

McCausland said facing these big teams is a two-sided sword with so many young kids this year.

While it gives them great experience against the top wrestlers, it forces them to try to adapt to a new level quickly.

Freshman Billy Gallo, who wrestles at the 165-weight class, said the matches are a different level of intensity and competition.

“Match by match I have to continue to get better and the only way to do that is to wrestle better guys,” Gallo said. “I haven’t won a lot of matches this year and that just gives me more boost to strive.”

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