U.S. National Freestyle Coach Zeke Jones provides encouragement in the corner to Jordan Burroughs during Burroughs’ grueling, five-match run to winning a gold medal at the World Championships. Larry Slater photo.
Continued from page 10
You still need to qualify 60 kg/132 lbs. and 66 kg/145.5 lbs. for the Olympics. What is going to be the key to quali- fying those classes for London? The Pan Am Olympic Qualifier (in March in Orlando, Fla.) is what we are trying to figure out as a staff. We are looking at the process we are going to use, and only through good advice and counsel will we be able to determine what we are going to do at 60 and 66 kilos. At the end of the day, we obviously have to make sure we have those weights qualified for the Olympic Games next year.
How great of an event do you see April’s U.S. Olympic
Team Trials in Iowa City being? The Olympic Trials will be a great event. If we have 60 and 66 qualified at that point, then it truly is an Olympic Trials. Carver- Hawkeye Arena is going to pack a lot of fans in there and I think there will be great energy there. We can count on a great event and get our team selected there. What adjustments are you making with identifying some of the younger wrestlers in freestyle? We want to identify some of the best wrestlers in this country
and bring them to the Olympic Training Center at a younger age. We want to start them early and develop them early in freestyle. We hope to start identifying these kids at a younger age. Hopefully, that plan will help us improve our results at the Senior level.
The U.S. was very close to winning the team title at the
2011 Worlds. What kind of message does that send? We’re doing the right things and we’re improving and getting
better. Did we just correct all the United States wrestling prob- lems in that weekend? No, we did not. We still have a lot of areas to improve in. We are trying to move folkstyle and freestyle closer together, and work with our college coaches to have total buy-in to the National Team program in freestyle. We have revamped and enhanced the Regional Training Centers. We’ve launched a talent identification program. We had a good group of guys that wrestled well at the World Championships, but by no means do we have a system in place quite yet that compares with what Russia has. They still have a lot more depth than we do right now, but our model is progressing. Russia obviously is still very good, but they are not quite as dominant as they’ve been.
11 USA Wrestler
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