Wrestling juggernaut wins big
All competitors quality for Nationals March 3 and 4
Concordia’s wrestling team steamrolled through the Quebec/Atlantic championships last weekend at the University of New Brunswick. All seven of its competitors qualified for the Canadian Interuniversity Sport National Championships, hosted by Brock University in St. Catharines March 3 and 4.
Those successful results were not surprising considering that the team’s internationally renowned coach Victor Zilberman has placed 81 of his athletes on the podium at the National Championships since 1980.
Leading the way for this year’s edition of the Stingers is Tyler Marghetis, who will be looking for his third straight national title in the 76 kg class.
For Marghetis, who has represented Canada as a wrestler at the World University Games in Turkey, anything less than a CIS championship would be a disappointment. And the pressure doesn’t bother him.
“I try to rise to the challenge. I try to use it as an extra source of motivation, instead of something like fear that would hamper my performance,” Marghetis said. “There are other goals in my future that I have to use this competition as a springboard for.”
Concordia’s wrestling program produces elite athletes who go beyond the Canadian university level to represent Canada on the international stage.
Martine Dugrenier, a former three-time Concordia Athlete of the Year, brought home a silver medal from the World Championships last summer.
“It was fantastic. We’ve been working on getting to the international level since I started at Concordia,” said Dugrenier, who graduated with an Athletic Therapy degree in 2004 and is finishing her final course of the Sports Administration diploma program this semester.
Dugrenier, a gymnast when she came under Zilberman’s eye at Vanier College, gives a lot of the credit for her success to her wrestling mentor.
“As a coach, [Zilberman] takes all his athletes and coaches them individually, with their own training programs,” she explained. “He’s very special. You can see his passion transfer to all his athletes, too.”
Zilberman, multiple winner of the CIS Coach of the Year award, takes pride in what his wrestlers have accomplished on the mats, but that’s not all. “When they graduate — anything they do to succeed — you feel good.”
Marghetis was named one of the CIS’s top eight Academic All-Canadians for his outstanding 4.07 GPA (out of 4.3) while studying for his Pure and Applied Mathematics major and a minor in Philosophy.
Math is his second passion after wrestling. “Although they are very different worlds, there are some parallels,” Marghetis explained. “You have to train yourself hard in both to become part of the high-performance culture. I can approach that sort of culture with my own wrestling background in mind, and that helps.”
It isn’t a stretch to say that every one of Concordia’s wrestlers is a medal hopeful this year. Along with Marghetis, Jonathan Rioux, Tim Wadsworth, Tony Ronci, Jamie Mancini, rookie Serguei Guevorkian and David Zilberman — Victor Zilberman’s son — have all enjoyed very successful seasons thus far in meets held before the Nationals.