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2011 Blair Wrestling Summer Day Camp brochure/application now available: 2011 Blair Wrestling Camp

This article written by Dave Ritterpusch for the May 15, 2011 edition of Amateur Wrestling News. Not to be reproduced in any way shape or form without the explicit permission of Amateur Wrestling News. Over his illustrious career, Kellen Russell had won every major tournament he had entered at least once; well, make that every one but the ultimate prize in American folk style wrestling, the NCAAs.   At Blair Academy in New Jersey, Kellen won the premier in-season high school tournaments in America, Ironman and Beast of the East, as well as...

Written and Reported by Dave Ritterpusch Doing well on Saturday, the 3rd and final day of NCAAs, is one of the ultimate tests in amateur wrestling. (Bear in mind that the only wrestlers still wrestling at NCAAs come Saturday are those who have won All American status the previous day.)  So when Blair’s Kellen Russell and Ed Ruth went 3-0 on Saturday, March 19, 2011, they added another chapter to Blair’s legendary wrestling history. For Kellen, a red-shirt junior at Michigan, the victory in the NCAA finals of the 141 lb weight c...

Written and reported by Dave Ritterpusch This past weekend, March 5 & 6, 2011, seven former Blair wrestlers qualified automatically for this year’s NCAA championships by virtue of winning three individual championships and taking four high places in major NCAA qualifiers. In the course of this successful weekend, Kellen Russell, wrestling for Michigan, won his 3rd Big 10 title -- in 3 attempts – and was named the Big 10 tournament’s Outstanding Wrestler. USA #1 Kellen Russell remained undefeated in this his red-shirt junior ye...

Written and Reported by Dave Ritterpusch As soon as the referees’ whistles sounded to start the first matches at the 76th National Prep Championship Tournament Friday morning, February 25, 2011, Blair’s Joe McKenna, the #1 seed at 103 lbs, had his opponent on his back and pinned --- well, officially, Joe took 15 seconds. With those 2 super-quick team points for the pin and 2 more for the win, Blair leaped to the lead, which it quickly built upon, thanks especially to its dominant five lower weight wrestlers, who had 13 pins and a te...

As you know, the Blair Wrestling team will be competing at Prep Nationals this weekend, and has become tradition, each year we choose to wrestle for a cause. Once again, the Blair Wrestling team has decided to Pin Down Cancer. When we put our heads together to figure out a cause, cancer kept coming back as the most obvious and most worthy choice. And with the Adam Frey Foundation, we have an organization near and dear to us where we will contribute the money we raise. Here is how the Pin Down campaign works. Throughout this week (and into next ...

Written and Reported by Coach Charles Danhof Last week Shawn Miracle travelled to Lafayette to compete in the Doug Cherry Invitational. He won his first two matches by the same score, 6-0, to make the finals and face Brian Samuels of UMBC. After giving up an early takedown, Shawn got to work and racked up enough points to win by a tech fall. Shawn also earned the Outstanding Wrestler award for his efforts. Then, this past weekend, Shawn followed up his performance by winning his second tournament in a row. After recording pins in his first two ...

Written and Reported by Dave Ritterpusch Blair and Coach Buxton’s credo has long been, “We duck nobody.” So on successive weekends the end of January and the beginning of February, as Blair moved into the heart of its 2010-2011 dual-meet schedule, it took on the two programs that were #2 and #3 in the USA – behind only Blair -- over the past decade. This gauntlet-run began on Saturday, January 29 as USA co #1 team from last season, St Paris Graham (OH), visited Blair for the first time ever. Then, the following weekend B...

"The Standard of Excellence" - the brand new encyclopedic work about amateur wrestling written by Dave Ritterpusch will soon be available at the Blair Academy Bookstore. Read the Full Summary Here. Click Here to buy your copy now!

Written and Reported by Dave Ritterpusch On Saturday, January 22, at the so-called “2011 Final Four” in Easton, PA, Blair used 22 different wrestlers in running rough shod over a field of 10 teams that included the top-ranked public schools in Pennsylvania and Georgia, the perennial #1 team from the state of Washington and the 2nd ranked public school in New Jersey. Competing without 2010 Fargo Junior National Champ Austin Ormsbee, who is recovering from an ankle sprain, Blair used most of its starters in just 3 of 5 matches, and wr...