Austin Sams came to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with the idea of being a nurse and a wrestler.
While he has abandoned the nursing plan in favor of accounting and finance, the redshirt junior has maintained collegiate wrestling, which was what initially coaxed him into coming south from his Cincinnati home.
Sams has a challenge this evening as he and the Mocs square off against The Citadel, the team picked in the preseason to finish second in the Southern Conference. He’ll face Aaron Walker, a defending league champion and the Bulldogs’ bell cow with a 19-8 overall record and a 3-0 league mark.
The Citadel (4-4, 2-1) enters Maclellan Gym smarting from a 21-13 loss to Appalachian State this past Sunday while the reigning champion Mocs were skating past Campbell. Both The Citadel and UTC (2-0) are behind the conference-leading Mountaineers.
Sams will have to beat Walker to extend a six-match win streak.
Always one of the best-conditioned Mocs, Sams also is one of the best-fed. Next to music and being outdoors, he likes to cook.
After spending part of last year at 141 pounds — “I was miserable, sucked out bad,” he recalled — he finished the season at 149 pounds and stepped in as a starter when Shawn Greevy was injured just before the conference tournament. He made a good showing before falling just shy of NCAA tournament qualification.
“That’s when he really began to find himself,” Mocs coach Heath Eslinger said. “He has skills and he finally began using them.”
At the Eastern Michigan Duals, Sams not only lost every match but lost by pin.
The trip and its outcome for him personally didn’t sit well, and it brought that inner resolve boiling to the surface.
“I don’t have it in me to quit and I’m not going to give anything. I’m going to get after people for seven minutes,” he said of his personal wrestling philosophy. “It’s conditioning, stamina and mindset — pushing through each situation, mental toughness.”
If his father didn’t know it, he learned relatively early that his son was a tough kid. During a baseball game, Sams, playing second base, took a bad-hop grounder to the face.
“My dad told me to get up and play. I turned around and I was grinning, but my mouth was a bloody mess and I’d knocked out the better parts of my two front teeth,” he recalled. “He looked at me and just said, ‘Aw, dude.”’
He made a trip to the dentist later that day.
Sams is a converted hockey player who didn’t begin to wrestle full-time until middle school.
“Yeah, we have hockey in Cincinnati. As a matter of fact, one of my old teammates now plays for the Toronto Maple Leafs,” he said.
“The thing about Sams is you know he’s going to bring everything he’s got,” Eslinger said.
Sams also has adjusted to being a 157-pounder, and he makes weight simply through daily practice. It is a new-found freedom.
“At Gardner-Webb I was four pounds under the day of weigh-ins,” he said. “Ever since I started wrestling competitively, I’ve lost weight. This year is a lot more enjoyable. I come to practice with the idea of getting better rather than losing weight.”
Sams has so much more than conditioning on his side, Eslinger said.
“He just keeps on keeping on. He’s very consistent,” the coach apprised. “He comes in and does what’s asked of him every single day, and he’s starting to reap the rewards of his work.”
Contact Ward Gossett at wgossett@timesfreepress.com or 423-886-4765. Follow him at Twitter.com/wardgossett.