By Nathaniel Maund

The MAC Championships are nine days and an eight-hour bus ride away from starting. The Bobcats will be in DeKalb, Illinois at Northern Illinois on Mar. 5, but until then, they’ve got some time to kill. This presents a bit of a dilemma for the new (three-way) conference champs. Do they rest their best wrestlers or push them extra hard to improve before the tournament begins? I talked to coach Joel Greenlee about this very topic last week in his office after practice.

Are the wrestlers peaking at the right time?

Yeah, I think so. Everybody’s a little bit different. Every guy’s in a little different spot. Some of it’s because they’re hurt, they were this, they were that, at some point during the year. But I feel, as a group, we’re pretty close to where we need to be. We’re not exactly where we need to be for the MAC Tournament, but the MAC Tournament’s still two weeks away. So that’s where we’re going to spend that next two weeks really kind of specializing each guy and kind of refining what they do and maybe just working on the individual technique and tactics and stuff like that.

Do you (the coaches) incoorperate scouting reports of opposing wrestlers into your preparation?

Obviously after Eastern we’ll have wrestled everybody. Not that every one of those guys is gonna be in the MAC Tournament or anything like that. You might have one or two guys where hey, this guy’s really good at, whatever the position is that gives us some trouble. We’ll be able to work on some things to get better in that position. Or, to stay out of that position if that’s what we need to do (laughs).

So that’s what we’ll really spend those two weeks on. Really getting ready for individual opponents, working on explosion, working on scoring, scoring offense, all that stuff.

Are you going to go harder during the week, or, I’m sure a lot of guys are banged up, will you let them rest?

I don’t know. I don’t think we’re gonna do it any different than we’ve done it all year. As far as the banged up and letting guys rest, all year long we’ve aired on the side of caution and we’ll continue to do that. We have a three-day cycle of what we do, and we’ll continue to do that getting ready for Eastern (Ohio won 28-9).

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Here’s what senior Germane Lindsey had to say about the two-week break.

This week for sure we’re pushing our bodies pretty tough, because we have a whole week off. And then next week we’ll probably back off a little bit. But for me personally I’m just going to be working on my weaknesses and my conditioning, push my conditioning to the top level so I’m ready for Nationals. So those are the two main