SPORTS

Scott Bradley - Staff Reporter

It didn't take long for this year's newcomers on the Gophers wrestling team to figure out where they would compete.

During a recruiting visit last October, five of the nine freshmen met the coaching staff and other wrestlers on the Gophers squad. After that visit Tim Kinsella, a freshman from Litchfield, Minn., and the other recruits were sold on the program.

"This is easy," he said. "I did not want to wrestle anywhere else but Minnesota. I always wanted to represent Minnesota, and I knew we were going to be number one after I came here and met the other guys."

Kinsella had reason to be optimistic about his decision. This year's recruiting class is ranked first in the country by Amateur Wrestling News.

Along with Kinsella, the group includes: Ty Friederichs, Josh Holiday, Brandon Eggum, Brent Boeshans, Delaney Berger, Dustin Berger, Drew Chacon and Eddie Pak.

Holiday, from Anaheim, Calif., said he talked to the other recruits about the program during his visit and said they all wanted to compete together on the same team rather than wrestle elsewhere.

"I visited Oklahoma after Minnesota, but there was still no doubt in my mind where I was going," Holiday said.

Head coach J Robinson and assistant coach Dave Grant knew this was an important recruiting year, especially since the team lost All-Americans Brett Colombini, Tim Harris and Chad Carlson from last season.

"We looked around the country for guys with the best attitudes," Grant said. "This coaching staff worked real hard to get these guys to wrestle here. These are guys we wanted all along."

Robinson said most freshmen will redshirt their first season, which means they will sit out one year without losing a season of eligibility. But he is not ruling out the possibility that some of the new wrestlers may compete this season.

One of the highly touted freshmen who might see some action right away is Delaney Berger, who earned All-America honors at 160 pounds as a junior and senior in high school outside of Bismarck, N.D.

Delaney Berger said the practices are difficult and mentally draining. But he hopes that hard work will pay off at the end of the season if the team can make a run a the NCAA championship. The University will host the national championships at the Target Center in March.

"It's an intensity level that a lot of people can't even dream of," he said. "It's pounding day after day, and it's just a matter of preparing yourself emotionally and mentally every day."

Kinsella said it is that intensity that attracted him to Minnesota.

"It's tough like I knew it was going to be," he said. "This team looks really strong and that's why I came here -- because I wanted to compete with a national contender."

Kinsella, who won a state title his senior year, will likely compete at 158 pounds.

"Now its like ... state champ against state champ," he said. "It's unbelievable the caliber of people we have here, from wrestlers to coaches."

While most of this year's wrestlers were recruited by other top programs around the country, Grant said some of the recruiting included a little luck.

Boeshans, who wrestles at heavyweight, was virtually unknown out of high school. The only other school to recruit him was North Dakota State, despite his third-place finish in the national tournament.

"A lot of people just didn't know him," Grant said. "No one was really recruiting him. He loves to wrestle. He would even wrestle on weekends."

Grant said this year's recruiting class reflects its ranking. "This is the toughest group of kids we've had since I've been here," he said. "They aren't afraid to get in your face, and they aren't going to back down."

Recruits can commit to a school as early as mid-November, and Grant said Minnesota brought in 15 wrestlers in time for the early signing period.

"We beat a lot of the teams who were after some of these guys," he said. "We did our job of bringing these guys in here. It consumes a lot of our time.

Since he arrived at Minnesota in 1986, Robinson has attracted some of the nation's top recruits to help build the program into a consistent national contender. It is this winning attitude that helped him sign this year's group of freshmen.

"Our goal is to win the NCAAs," Kinsella said. "We're young, but we've got the talent to do it. We just got to put everything together and listen to J."