The First Comments from Cowboy Wrestling After the Cancellation of the NCAA Championships
STILLWATER -- This being spring break and the campus being closed, not just for this week, but for the next two weeks after that with students on a remote learning (online) class schedule; there is not a lot of folks on campus. That especially goes for this week. Oklahoma State wrestling head coach and past Olympic Gold Medalist and 6-time World Champion John Smith expected to be in Minneapolis for an attendance record-setting NCAA Wrestling Championship. The tournament was being held in the Minnesota Vikings stadium and had sold 50,000 plus tickets. Instead that event was cancelled and the first reaction from Smith and one of his top wrestlers, the No. 3 seed at 125 pounds Nick Piccininni, came in a story on Wednesday in The Oklahoman.
Smith talked to his team once he knew and the veteran coach knew the ramifications of the news he was delivering. For some, like Piccininni, a four-time Big 12 champion, hewas losing his last chance at winning an NCAA title.
“It was just shock,” said Piccininni speaking to Scott Wright of The Oklahoman, who had a 26-2 record heading into the NCAA championships. “When you hear something like that, at first, you don’t know how to comprehend what’s going on. It’s crazy news. It was a sad moment for me and the seniors.
“But life goes on, and there’s more to it than having the tournament and, God forbid, something bad happening.”
Piccininni has plans of being a graduate assistant at Oklahoma State and continuing to wrestle in national events through USA Wrestling. There could be a move to allow seniors from the teams this past winter that lost their post season opportunities to come back.
There still remains an outside chance that seniors from winter sports will get an additional year of eligibility, but nothing is promised.
“In anything you do, if you’re dedicated and you put your into it, you’re gonna be upset,” Piccininni said to The Oklahoman. “But it is what it is. You can wish you could change the outcome, but there’s nothing you can do about it.”
It was a family situation with John Smith as his son, Joe, is a two-time All-American and qualified again by finishing fifth at the Big 12 Championships.
“We had a good experience at the Big 12 that we shared together,” John Smith said. “I got to spend some time with Joe following the tournament and let him know what I felt, and the excitement that I felt."
Smith knows how hard it is to win matches, to make the NCAA Championships and that Joe has experienced a lot of injuries and difficult circumstances.
“If that’s the end of his career, then I think we both feel really good about ending it that way," Smith added in The Oklahoman story.
