Taking it personally
Tyler Cochran is a scoreboard watcher.
Moments after he and his Central Valley High School teammates had completed a 61-14 Greater Spokane League wrestling win at Gonzaga Prep, the 215-pound senior started casting about for news from the Ferris-East Valley match.
“If East Valley loses, we still have a shot at a share of the league championship,” he said, quickly running through all the various permutations and outcomes that would leave Central Valley on top.
Cochran has even more of a personal stake in the standings than he has in the past. He feels responsible for Central Valley’s loss to East Valley to start the season.
Cochran, a sixth-place state-placer a year ago, and teammate Tanner Teeples, a third-place finisher a year ago and former Utah state champion, were suspended to start the season, banned from competing in dual meets or the season-opening tournament at CV and the prestigious Tri-State Tournament at North Idaho College.
“To this day I don’t really know how it happened,” Cochran said. “It was just me and a buddy being pretty stupid. We started something we never should have and now we regret it. We’re just trying to move on now.”
Serving the suspension was one thing. Cochran’s punishment was watching the Bears drop a one-point decision, 29-28.
“That hurt so bad,” Cochran said. “It just killed me to have to sit by and watch.”
Cochran practiced with the team during the suspension – pushing his regular practice partner, Jake Neumann hard in workouts.
“I have the best practice partner,” Cochran said. “My goal is to push him to be the best he can be and to win a state title and his goal is to the same for me. Jake is a big 189-pounder and he’s really strong, especially in the upper body. He’s as good as any of the 215-pounders I have to face out there and faster than most of them.
“My goals I put in this order. I want my team to win a state championship. That’s the important one. After that, I want to see Jake win a state title and I want to win my weight class.”
There was a great deal of excitement about Cochran’s senior season. As a returning state placer, it wasn’t a surprise to see him listed as one of two favorites to win this year’s Class 4A title in his weigh class.
Cochran returned the Central Valley lineup for the Bears 38-25 win over Ferris, winning by pin his first time out to help the team recover from a 25-6 early deficit after the Saxons won six of the first eight matches.
“We overlooked them a little bit,” he said. “I don’t think a lot of us really understood what was going on and all of a sudden, we were down by 20 points or something like that. We came back and won, thankfully.”
Dual meets are one thing to a wrestler. Postseason, however, is all about tournament wrestling, and Cochran missed out on several big ones.
“You really need to wrestle tournaments to get yourself in the kind of shape you need to be in,” he said. “The first tournament I was able to wrestle in was the Reno Tournament of Champions just before Christmas. I was feeling pretty gassed by the time I got to the second period, especially the second day.”
Cochran still managed to bring home a seventh-place trophy from the gigantic Nevada tournament. He followed that up by handily winning last weekend’s Pacific Northwest Classic tournament at University, scoring a major decision over Lakeside’s Dustin Baldwin in the final.
The Washington Wrestling Report, a Web site devoted to high school wrestling in the state, ranked Cochran No. 5 among all 215-pounders in the state. Baldwin is ranked No. 6. Only Matt Foxworthy, from South Kitsap, is ranked ahead of Cochran amongst Class 4A opponents.
Monday Cochran added yet another stellar performance, beating three-time Japanese champion Takuya Masuda in an All-Star exhibition match with the Japanese National Team.
“He was really tough,” Cochran said. “I was wrestling at 255 pounds and he was really quick, especially for how big he is.”
This weekend Cochran and his teammates compete at the Rocky Mountain Classic in Missoula.
“This will be a good test for us and a great test for Tyler,” CV coach John Owen said. “There are some great teams in this tournament and there should be some great matches.”
“This is where you start getting yourself ready for state,” Cochran said. “These are the tournaments that get you ready to go for it all.
“Between events like this and our coaching staff, we’ll be ready. We have the best coaching staff any team could ever ask for.”