LU wrestlers settle for silver in CIS national championship matches

Nicole Plummer and Gaston Tardif came up a little shy on Saturday in their effort to bring home the gold at the Canadian Interuniversity Sport national wrestling championships.

Plummer fell 4-0 to the University of Calgary’s Leah Callahan in the 82-kilogram gold medal match at the C.J. Sanders Fieldhouse, bringing to a close her Lakehead Thunderwolves career after five seasons and helping her team to a fourth-place finish overall.

“It’s OK. She’s a good wrestler, so it makes the match even better,” said Plummer after her two-round defeat, which was scoreless after the opening three minutes. “She’s a lot stronger and I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting more cardio and leg shots and not a lot of pounding on the head, which was confusing to me.”

Plummer last won national silver in 2008, and though gold would have capped a pretty stellar university wrestling career, the Windsor, Ont. native wasn’t complaining with second place.

“It’s my last year, so going out with silver is pretty good, yeah,” she said.

Finishing in fourth as a team is also something to be proud of, Plummer added.

“We qualified all of our girls. We made top three at the OUAs and that was our initial goal. So fourth at CIS nationals is pretty awesome,” she said.

Tardif, a native of Calgary, faced a familiar foe in his gold-medal 57-kilogram match, but once again his opponent got the better of him.

“The tournament was pretty good. I wrestled well yesterday. I’ve wrestled (Concordia’s) David Tremblay a few times now and haven’t beaten him. In the first round I felt I wrestled really well. In the second round I got my arm trapped and that usually finishes a round,” said the fourth-year student athlete. “It’s hard to get your arm free, so it was tough.”

The Wolves had three other wrestlers in the hunt for medals on Saturday. Dustin Helwig captured bronze in the 54-kilogram category, beating the University of Toronto’s Shujon Mazumder, while Colton Woznow took third in the 90-kilogram division, beating McMaster’s Sean house. On the women’s side Aislyn Torfason had to settle for fourth in the 59-kilogram category.

The results left the men’s team in a disappointing ninth place, a year after co-capturing the OUA championship.

Lakehead coach Brock Curtis called it a tough tournament. With only five of his 10 men qualifying, winning the overall men’s title was all but out of reach unless his wrestlers won every match. But they gave it their all and that’s all he could ask for, Curtis said.

“Perhaps as a team it was not exactly where we wanted to finish on the men’s side, but I look at the women’s team and they wrestled phenomenally. It’s tough competition, certainly. The league is very equal,” Curtis said.

Curtis’s predecessor at LU had a lot to cheer about on Saturday. Owen Dawkins, who coaches the University of Alberta squads, led the women’s team to a CIS championship, their 47 points narrowly edging out 2009 champion Calgary by two and Brock by three.

His men’s team finished eighth with 26 points, one more than Lakehead.

Concordia took the men’s title with 55 points, led by gold medalists Tremblay and David Zilberman, who took top spot in the 130-kilogram weight class.

Other individual winners on the men’s side included Western’s Stevendd Takahashi, UNB’s Vince Cormier, Western’s Ilya Abelev, UNB’s Shawn Date-Finley, Saskatchewan’s Ryan Myrfield and Daniel Olver, Regina’s Connor Millow and Guelph’s Corey Jarvis.

In the women’s event other winners were Brock’s Jasmine Mian and Diana Ford, Calgary’s Gen Haley – who became the first woman in CIS history to win five straight gold medal titles – Concordia’s Nikita Chicoine, Guelph’s Allison Leslie and Calgary’s Erica Wiebe.

Nationals will be held again in Thunder Bay next year.