The Wisconsin wrestling team has been gearing up for what promises to be a successful season, with the opportunity to improve on last year's performance.
The Badgers took 15th place at the 2005 NCAA meet, with the top 10 was in sight of many of the players.
According to UW head coach Barry Davis, hard work will be required in order to hit that goal in the upcoming season.
"If we're going to [get into the top 10], we've got to be clicking on all cylinders, we've got to get to the details and we've got to do everything right at the right times," Davis said. "We'll see when the time comes if that's a possibility, but I think we've got an even better team than last year."
"We've got to get everyone healthy first, and we'll see where we're at when the big meets come in March."
Davis holds a high level of confidence and expects a great deal of responsibility from his senior team captains, Kelly Flaherty and Tyler Turner.
"Flaherty has been doing the extra things after practice, being in the weight room, just doing extra training. There's been great leadership there," Davis said. "Tyler's probably the most verbal out of all of them, doing a lot of things individually, just talking to the other guys about extra workouts and other stuff.
We will need these great leaders to step up in order to be successful with our team this season."
Flaherty, junior Collin Cudd and redshirt freshman Dallas Herbst are among the wrestlers who have shown strides of improvement during the offseason.
"They've just been working on doing the little things right, which makes a huge difference when you have really good competition as we do," Turner said. "They're taking time before and after practice, taking their own time working on what they need to do."
The Badgers competed in the Lonestar Duals in Dallas, Texas, on Jan. 7. The meet gave some mixed signals about UW's current status.
Despite dropping the early match 19-18 to UT-Chattanooga, Wisconsin was able to rebound with an easy 36-3 defeat of Brown and a 21-15 victory over North Carolina.
Davis, taking the personality of a coach expecting greater things of his squad, has been focusing more on the sole loss than the two victories.
"You have got to be ready in those early-morning matches because you can't just work into a match. You have to be ready for every match," he explained. "Some guys got caught flat-footed and it seemed we weren't ready to go right away. We've got to learn to be putting people down with authority."
Davis added that the team will need to tighten up when the scores are close in particular meets.
"In the close matches, we have to find a way to score in certain situations. You've got to make things happen in order to get the win," he said. "In the future, we can't have losses like that."
The Badgers will start their season this Friday against the Iowa Hawkeyes, who finished seventh at last year's national meet.
"The Big Ten is one of the premier conferences and the first two teams we play out of the chute are Northwestern and Iowa, who are both very good teams," Davis said, "so we're looking forward to it. We'll take the next weekend to work on some technical skills to get ready for it."
"We believe we have a great team, so we're looking to open other teams' eyes, and Iowa's going to be a good place to start," Turner added. "We're really looking forward to it, as it's going to be a great match and a great start to our Big Ten season.
We want to be at our peak when the Big Ten season starts, as well as at the NCAAs, and that's what we're working toward. That all starts next week."
Turner suggested that with hard work, a healthier team and some good days on the mats, it wouldn't be out of the question for Wisconsin to land a spot in the top four at the NCAA meet in March.
"We're good enough to do it. We just have to get it through our heads that we are good enough to do so. A lot of the guys are starting to [believe] it."
