Wrestler Terri McNutt and football player Andy Fantuz were named the University of Western Ontario's female and male athletes of the year. (Morris Lamont, LFP)
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Last update till Monday after Nationals
UWO's outstanding athletes this year were a wide receiver and a wrestler .
By JIM CRESSMAN, FREE PRESS SPORTS REPORTER Thu, March 30, 2006
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Wrestler Terri McNutt and football player Andy Fantuz were named the University of Western Ontario's female and male athletes of the year. (Morris Lamont, LFP) |
One gets a grip on the football and doesn't let go.
The other gets a grip on an opponent on the mat and wins every time.
Western Mustangs' wide receiver Andy Fantuz and wrestler Terri McNutt were honoured last night as the university's top male and female athletes for 2005-06.
McNutt, from Joyceville, left the London Convention Centre with the F.W.P. Jones Trophy, while Fantuz, from Chatham, won the Dr. Claude Brown Memorial Trophy.
McNutt dominated Ontario University Athletics wrestling, undefeated at tournaments and championships the past four years.
She won a Canadian Interuniversity Sport gold medal this year to go with the bronze she won last year and the silver in 2004.
McNutt hopes to be a member of the Canadian team at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Women's wrestling made its debut at the 2004 Games in Athens.
She got a taste of the Olympic experience when she trained with the Canadian team at the U.S. Olympic training centre near San Diego over Christmas and competed against Olympians.
"I originally never thought I would want to go to the Olympics, but the closer I got to it and then seeing the women compete for the first time at the last Olympics -- that's given me inspiration," McNutt said.
"When I was in California, I was with that level of people. I know I'm not quite there, but I know I can get there. That experience has given me the drive and a lot of confidence, especially to score on people who have been at the Olympics."
McNutt, completing fifth-year nursing, won four straight OUA championships.
She commutes to school from Brantford, where she lives with her boyfriend of five years, Victor McLean, a firefighter in Oakville.
She has one more year at Western but has used up her five years of athletic eligibility. She will still compete in tournaments with Western, except OUA and CIS events.
McNutt took up wrestling in Grade 9. "I never took it very seriously in high school. Then, come my second year (at Western), that's when I took it serious."
She'll compete in the Canadian senior championships in Saskatchewan in early May. The 2007 nationals will begin the qualification process for the 2008 Olympic team.
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Mar 29 2006
Sports Briefs
n Two wrestlers from Kamloops continue to find success in the world of women's freestyle wrestling. Hayley McLeary, a 2005 high school graduate, recently triumphed at the Canadian Junior Female Wrestling Championships in Fredricton, N.B.
She defeated Jocelyn Dresser in the 72-kg final. McLeary will go on to represent Canada in September at the World Junior Freestyle Wrestling Championships in Guatemala.
Another Kamloops secondary school graduate (2003), Miranda Dick, was recently presented with the Premiers Award as the top female wrestler in B.C.
Dick, a third-year university wrestler at Simon Fraser University, had an outstanding year in 2005.
She won the CIS university championship, won her third national junior championship, was third at the national senior female championship and placed seventh at the world junior championships.
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The Differences Between Boys and Girls
Thursday, March 30, 2006, 09:25 AM
After enrolling in a local wrestling club, my oldest sons, William Wallace (8) and Isaiah Athanasius (6) developed a taste for a conditioning drill called “Bulldog” -- or, at least, that's what it's called around here.
In the exercise, a small number of competitors are placed in the center of the wrestling room on their hands and knees, and are told to tackle the other kids as they sprint past them. Those who are taken down then become “bulldogs,” and join in the hunt until all of the remaining participants have been captured. “Bulldog” combines sprinting, tests of agility, skill development (in this case, take-downs), and wholesome violence.
The kids love “Bulldog” so much they don't realize that they're being run ragged, although their grateful parents recognize the benefits when their boys come home and go right to bed, their anarchic energies temporarily depleted.
The club's enrollment includes kids from five years of age to about fifteen. Among that number are several young girls, who are there primarily for the conditioning benefits. One of them, a lovely little ten-year-old Latina, is an instinctive grappler who will do very well in Judo someday. She has a knack for unbalancing her opponents, and more than holds her own against boys her age in the live take-down competitions – due, at least in part, to the inhibited way the boys behave when they are required to place hands on a girl and throw her to the mat. That sort of thing doesn't come naturally to 8-to-10-year-old boys, particularly after they've absorbed several years of admonitions about not picking on girls.
During one round of “Bulldog,” that talented and athletic 10-year-old girl received a rude reality check in the form of a full-speed collision with my 8-year-old son, who was looking the other way and had no opportunity to avoid the girl or mitigate the blow. The results were predictable, and momentarily worrisome. She was bruised and had the wind knocked out of her, but otherwise unharmed – to my great relief, as well as that of her mother, since a concussion had been a very good possibility.
Another favorite drill is the “Human Tug-of-War,” in which participants are told to push, pull, or drag each other across No Man's Land.
“You ought to see what it's like when we get the High School wrestlers out doing this,” chuckled the coach amid the mayhem. “Elbows, shoulder-blocks, punches – those kids let it all fly.”
I mentioned to him a similar conditioning drill-cum-gangfight called “Shepherd Ball” or “Black-Bottom,” which was devised by our High School wrestling coach in Rexburg, Idaho. Participants were taken into the padded wrestling room and divided into numerically identical teams of approximately the same aggregate weight. A “ball” was fashioned from a towel that had been wrapped in duct tape. Goals consisted of a duct-taped square on opposing walls, placed just above eye-level.
“OK,” Coach Karges told us. “The objective is for each team to get the `ball' into the box, in any way this can be accomplished. The other team can do anything it wants to stop them. Have fun.”
Then he'd blow a whistle, and testosterone-fueled trench warfare would ensue. Imagine
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U. S. Olympic Education Center wrestlers Amy Borgnini, Mervin Ford, Jenna Pavlik, Stefenie Shaw, Harry Lester, & Chaz Tillman read and give Olympic wrestling demos at Vandenboom Elementary School, Marquette, MI.