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Inside Hokie Sports
work ethic. He wasn’t
a guy that you looked
at and thought, ‘Wow,
this guy is a super
athlete,’ but he was a
good enough athlete
that, if he had that
work ethic that they
were telling me about,
then I felt he could be
really good.”
Dresser made a visit to the Haught home
and invited Haught to come down on an
official visit. He toured the facilities and
watched the Hokies’ football team play a
Thursday night game against Florida State.
He got along well with the current crop of
wrestlers, and it helped that his high school
coaches recommended coming to Tech.
An added bonus was Tech’s close proximity
to his home. The four-hour drive afforded his
parents the opportunity to watch him wrestle
frequently.
Haught signed with the Hokies—and he
went to work. He took a redshirt season his
first year on campus in part because Chris
Penny was firmly entrenched at 197 pounds
for the Hokies. He also needed to get stronger
and work on his technique. He possessed
tools, but was raw.
“He was an average college wrestler when
he got here,” Dresser said of Haught. “That
might be generous. But I wasn’t worried. I
knew he’d be the kind of guy to progress.
“The thing about Jared is that he’s such a
nice kid. That’s the one thing that holds him
back sometimes on the mat. Sometimes, he
has a hard time flipping that switch when
he gets on the mat. Especially in the sport
of wrestling, there has to be a warrior within
you, and that warrior has to have a mean
streak. Then when you step off the wrestling
mat, it’s OK to be Jared Haught, the really
nice kid, which he is.
“We need for him to flip that switch all the
way and be ferocious. We obviously saw that
at the end of last year. We saw a guy that was
going after people.”
Haught
qualified
for
the
NCAA
Championships as a redshirt freshman, but
really received national acclaim last March
when he earned All-America honors by
finishing in the top eight of his weight class.
He lost in the second round, yet came back
in the consolation rounds to win four straight
matches.
The last of those wins came against Duke’s
Conner Hartman, a longtime nemesis who
actually had beaten Haught for the ACC title
two weeks prior to the NCAA Championships.
Haught knocked off Hartmann 5-2 at the
NCAAs and ultimately finished in sixth place.
“That was really fun, really awesome,”
Haught said. “Beating him, that was a
really a good feeling. I had made it past
that milestone of beating someone that had
beaten me. I didn’t have a great Saturday [the
final day at the NCAA Championships], but
in the end, I got the All-America honors, and
that was cool. Everyone back home was really
proud of me.”
That win also got him thinking about
the future—and wanting more. Haught
probably sold himself short when he arrived
in Blacksburg. After all, such stories aren’t
commonplace, ones of rural kids earning
such accolades.
Yet, why can’t a young man of his
background accomplish amazing things? He
asks himself that question now.
“Being an All-American, that was my
original goal going into college,” Haught
said. “I thought that was all there was to it
and maybe that was all of my capability, but
now I see past that. I definitely think that a
national championship is realistic, and that’s
my new goal.”
That may be a tall task, considering
his weight class features two of the more
dominant wrestlers nationally—and two
guys who defeated him earlier this season.
Minnesota’s Brett Pfarr beat him at the
Cliff Keen Invitational in Las Vegas, and
Missouri’s J’den Cox edged him when the
Hokies and the Tigers wrestled in a dual
meet on Nov. 20.
The Cox match, though, gave Haught
some confidence. Cox is an Olympic bronze
medalist and two-time national champion,
but he only beat Haught 2-0.
“I felt like I was a little conservative,”
Haught said. “I put him [Cox] on a pedestal,
and I shouldn’t have. I wrestled an OK match.
I think there is a lot of room for improvement.
I look forward to wrestling him again.”
“He’s a guy that can contend for a title,”
Dresser said. “I’ve seen guys like him wrestle
on the stage on Saturday night. He improved
last year from December to March more than
anybody on our team. He exploded from
December to March. Exploded. He needs to
have that same explosion.”
Haught knows the road won’t be easy,
but then he never chooses the easy route
in anything. For example, most athletes
pick less strenuous majors. Only the
most ambitious balance a subject such as
mechanical engineering with their sport, and
Haught and a few other student-athletes,
including teammate Brooks Wilding—an
aerospace engineering major—form study
groups as a way to help each other.
But engineering practically runs in
Continued
from page 37