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Posted on July
2, 2019
5PM: Heavyweight was interesting. It was encouraging for both
athletes. Adam (Coon)
really impressed with his par terre, virtually all of his points came from
gutwrenches, so that was important. Then there was Cohlton Schultz, who
in my opinion, actually had certain advantages on the feet. How did you see
their two matches?
Coach
Matt Lindland: For me, that was a very intriguing matchup, period. You
had a Cadet World champ and a returning Junior World bronze medalist, someone
who is fully dedicated to Greco-Roman wrestling, and then you had a guy who is
just coming off of a World silver medal and who just won the Pan Am
Championships by pinning everybody in his path. Two guys, one who is up and
coming and the other who has proven himself on the international stage at the
Senior level. So you look at that matchup and you say, Okay, I know what Adam Coon is going to
do, he is going to bodylock you. But if you can stay out of that bodylock
situation, maybe you have a chance to beat him. And if anybody
in our country has a chance to beat him, it’s Cohlton Schultz. And who knows?
He might only be a year away from doing that, but it wasn’t his day.
Adam Coon has made some incredible
adjustments. He is a brilliant guy. You can listen to his
interviews, he believes that he might have had an easy draw at the World
Championships? Who knows? I don’t know if there is such a thing as an easy draw
at the Worlds. He did have a good path, but he still had to wrestle those
matches — and he went out and took those matches to his opponents in the same
manner.
But
he also realized that he needed to make some adjustments because people aren’t
going to just let him bodylock. He started to work on some other skills on the
feet but the most impressive thing he improved on is his par terre offense. He and his coaches from Michigan
are doing an incredible job preparing him and getting him ready. I’ve
only had one camp with Adam (this year) and we worked on that gutwrench for
three practices. I didn’t get a chance to see him use it. He actually tried a
few lifts at the Pan Ams so you can tell he’s trying to add some new skills to
his repertoire. He is going to come into this World Championships as hungry as
a guy who has never medaled because he feels like he has something to prove.
5PM:
No one can say he had an easy draw unless they believed he was going to beat
Eduard Popp from Germany, which I did not. If people have a brain, they would
know that was a match he probably wasn’t supposed to win and then he dumped
Popp and pinned him.
ML: Yes,
but I think that’s what makes him so hungry to keep making adjustments and
improvements, changing up things, and adding. You
know, he’s not making big, gross changes. Adam still has a build for a
bodylock. He has those long, long arms and knows how to move his opponent, get
their feet moving. He has four or five different attacks from the bodylock
position, as well. He can twist, he can suplex, run guys over, break them down.
He has many versatile attacks from there. But — he might not get to that
bodylock this year because people are going to stay away from him, so he’s
adding other scoring opportunities and I have some things in mind for camp that
I want to share with him.
But I am really excited to have Adam
Coon on our Team again this year. The fact that he wasn’t in Final X for
freestyle allowed him to prepare superbly and he did an outstanding job. And so
did Cohlton.
Personally, I didn’t know what to
expect. There were people who were predicting hard one way and there were
people predicting hard the other way. The majority of the average fans probably
picked Adam because of his accolades in the NCAA. The hardcore Greco fans were
really leaning more towards Man,
I think Cohlton Schultz can take this guy. But the size was a
huge factor and the strength was a huge factor. Coon said it himself, that
Cohlton would have tech’ed the 18-year-old version of Adam (laughs). And I
believe that to be true. But
he’s not wrestling the 18-year-old version of Adam Coon, he is wrestling a
returning silver medalist from the World Championships who is hungry to go out
and get us another medal for the United States. So I am really excited about
Adam’s prospects this year.
