For the first time in program history, the Raven Wrestling team and the campus of Benedictine College hosted the annual Heart Wrestling Championship on Saturday.
Benedictine finished with 49 points to take sixth overall while Jenson McDermott headlined a solid day for the Ravens with an all-conference selection.
McDermott defeated William Penn's Darwin Diaz in the third-place match by way of a 5-0 decision to earn third-team All-Heart honors.
The top three placers earned all-conference but McDermott wasn't the only top finisher for the Ravens. Tyson Albright took fourth place at 184 pounds, Michael Hummer took fifth place at 157 pounds, Keenan Graef took sixth place at 149 pounds and Oliver Severance took sixth place at 197 pounds.
Albright dropped the third-place match to Missouri Valley's Dayton Brown by fall. Hummer beat Graceland's Shea Swafford in the firth place match by way of an 8-6 decision. Graef was forced to forfeit his fifth-place match after trying to wrestler through an injury suffered earlier in the tournament. Severance dropped his fifth-place match to Waldor's James Howey.
The Heart was allotted 30 automatic bids into the 2020 NAIA Wrestling National Championship based on the number of individually-ranked wrestlers across the 10 qualifying weight classes.
A 14-member committee consisting of conference raters and oversight members will meet to select the remaining 12 national at-large qualifiers, which will be released Tuesday, February 25 by 5 p.m. The seeding and preliminary brackets will be announced on NAIA.org by 5 p.m. on Friday, February 28.
The 2020 NAIA Wrestling National Championships will take place at Hartman Arena in Park City – located just to the North of Wichita – March 6-7
