Valpo visits Chesterton for senior night today, so wrestlers Emmet Burkus and Lucas Anderson need not wait long to try to avenge one-point losses to Vikings at DAC meet

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Wrestlers from rivals Chesterton and Valparaiso faced off in eight of the 14 weight classes Saturday in the DAC Championships at Portage.
Based on the results of those, tonight’s rescheduled senior night match at Chesterton projects as a close one.
Chesterton scored 21 points in the eight matches, Valpo 17.
Two Trojans could make the team tally a little less interesting if they can do just a little better than they did Saturday.
On the one hand, sophomore Emmet Burkus came to the meet with the goal of making it to the podium and accomplished it with a fifth-place finish at 120 pounds. On the other hand, he could have earned a higher step on the podium if he could have scored or prevented a couple of points from his Valpo opponent.
Adam Wright edged Burkus, 11-10, lost his third-place match and finished fourth.
“That was a scrappy guy,” Burkus said, meaning tonight and perhaps beyond that. “I’ll get to wrestle him again.”
Burkus defeated Portage’s Julian Carley in the fifth-place match, pinning him in 1:49.
Exacting revenge tonight would be big for Burkus in continuing a recent trend toward making the confidence crisis that dogged him earlier shrink in his rear-view mirror.
“My mentality has gotten better. I came into the season with a bad mentality,” Burkus said. “It was weird. I was down. I don’t know why. I wasn’t confident in myself. And I feel that’s what I have to work on, getting more confident.”
From a tangible standpoint, Burkus said he also needs to “move more on bottom, and when I shoot, I need to commit to it.”
Valpo wrestler Benjamin Fedorchak’s toughest match on his way to winning the 190 championship at the DAC came against Chesterton’s Lucas Anderson, who made one move too many and paid for it.
“We wrestled a great match,” Trojans coach Andrew Trevino said. “We were still acclimatizing ourselves to a heavier weight class, bigger guys, and we wrestled him great for 5 minutes, 58 seconds. We had one mistake and it cost us the match, so we put that in our mental Rolodex.”
Anderson enters the rematch on a roll. He took third place after pinning Michigan City’s Jack Soller in 20 seconds and Crown Point’s Calvin Stewart in 2:07.
The JV matches begin at 6:30 p.m. The weight division at which the matches start is determined at weigh-in about an hour before that when an official reaches into a sack to pull out the number of one of the weight classes.