Coming in to Friday night's meet against their Mid-American Conference rival the Kent State Golden Flashes, the Buffalo wrestling team was hoping to break a four game losing-streak.
The Bulls' match against the Golden Flashes marked Buffalo's last home meet of the season, and the seniors were recognized before the meet. Although the Bulls (7-7, 0-5 MAC) lost by a lob-sided margin, 31-7, to the Golden Flashes (14-2, 3-0 MAC) 133-pound senior Mark Budd continued to dominate all takers as he decisively defeated Kent State's Danny Mitcheff by a 9-0 margin. Budd's win improved his dual meet record to an impressive 14-0. The victory also marked Budd's 99th career win.
"It's sad because it's the last 'at home' ever, probably the last home meet I'll ever wrestle anywhere, but I guess it's time to move on," Budd said.
Another bright spot for the Bulls was junior Mike Ragusa's 8-4 win over Sli Bostleman, scoring with a total of three takedowns. With the victory, Ragusa broke his five bout-losing streak coming into the meet.
Buffalo lost all the other matches in their meet, including a disappointing defeat of senior 184-pounder Ray Lamb at the hands of the nationally 20th-ranked Eric Chine, who scored the winning takedown within the final five seconds of the bout.
Freshman 125-pounder Dan Bishop was no match for Kent State's Chad Sportelli, who is ranked No. 18 in the country. Sportelli showed why he is nationally ranked, taking the match 9-3.
Heavyweight grappler Jason Weber also lost to a nationally ranked wrestler, when he faced No.19 in the nation Jermail Porter. Porter took an 8-3 decision over Weber.
"We hate losing," said head coach Jim Beichner. "We've been on a little bit of a downswing here, but when you lose and you're not out there giving it a full effort that makes it worse. We did that a couple of matches ago, and I don't think we did that tonight. We got a lot of guys on our team who are freshmen that were backups and were thrust into a starting role. They've been fighting all year, and I think that they've battled quite well all year right up until a little bit toward the end here, but tonight, although the score doesn't indicate that it was a close match, I thought that we battled much better than we have in the last couple of weeks. Hopefully we can rebound and come back and finish strong."
Due to senior Jake Blowers' untimely illness and an injury to 197-pound senior Ricky Scott, Buffalo was forced to forfeit its 197-pound bout.
"We've had so many injuries and illnesses this year it's just devastated our team and whoever's left has just got to go out there and compete and they're the ones who have to go out there and win," Beichner said. "Jake Blowers had an illness that the doctors would not allow him to compete tonight and our starter Ricky Scott has a herniated disc in his [neck]. He's been battling it all year, it happened way back almost in November and we didn't know how serious it was, but it turned out to be a lot more serious than we expected so we lost him for the year."
Regardless of the circumstances, Beichner doesn't want to use these problems as an excuse for his team's execution.
"It's just been one thing after another but like I said, that's not an excuse," Beichner said. "When you're in athletics there's good there's bad, there's injuries, there's sickness, but you got to find a way to get through it and do the best you can and that's what we need to do, we just need to focus and do the best we can."
The Bulls hope to break their losing streak on Feb. 17 at Binghamton. The teams hit the mats at 7 p.m.
