Ridge Lovett’s game plan was to not have a game plan.
The Nebraska wrestler hadn’t strategized at all during a run through the 149-pound division at the NCAA Championships in Detroit, and he wasn’t going to start once he reached the championship match — even if the No. 1-ranked wrestler was waiting.
Lovett, a sophomore seeded 10th in his weight class, blitzed through the bracket earlier this month at Little Caesars Arena and became Nebraska’s first national finalist since 2011, when Jordan Burroughs won a national title.
No matter how you slice it, Lovett was the underdog in the final. His opponent, top-ranked Yianni Diakomihalis, already had two national championships under his belt and entered the championship on a 74-match winning streak.
“I didn’t game plan for anybody this tournament, I just went out and wrestled,” Lovett said this week. “That’s really how I do best is without a game plan just going out and let it fly and just do my thing. But thinking back on it, maybe I should have game planned for Yianni a little bit more. But I wouldn’t change anything about how I wrestled that match or my tournament.”
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A week earlier at the Big Tens, a deep run in the national meet seemed far away for Lovett. He was on the wrong side of the third-fastest pin in Big Ten Tournament history in the semifinals at Pinnacle Bank Arena.
Lovett then medically forfeited the third-place match to finish fourth. Even still, the Idaho native said his mindset stayed the same leading into the NCAAs.
“I kept my mindset about the same,” said Lovett. “I went into both expecting to win and wrestling to win. At Big Ten’s, I got caught, that happens sometimes, and I just put that match behind me. Everybody gets caught, it happens, not dwelling on it too much.”
All told, it was an impressive season for Lovett, who paced the Huskers with 18 points in Detroit to lead Nebraska to a fifth-place finish, its best since 2009.
As Lovett and the rest of the Huskers get back on campus, unpack the season and enter offseason regimens, he’s unsure exactly how to devote his time.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet this offseason,” said Lovett. “Mikey (Labriola), we’ve really just been eating and playing video games since the first day we got back and it was like, ‘What do we do?’”
However, Lovett has at least one thing planned for his offseason. He plans to go back to his Idaho home and pick up the hobby he first got into three years ago.
“We had a boat, went to the little outdoor store, picked up a couple of wakeboards and then that was really it,” said Lovett. “We picked a couple up, called it good and was like ‘All right, let’s go boating.’”
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