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Ohio St v. Xavier ncaa tournament Credit: Fred David , Fred David

If it’s true that tough scrimmages make for tougher athletes, then Penn wrestlers have an advantage.

Each practice, they work out with Matt Valenti, an assistant coach who, in April, will try out for the Olympics in Iowa City, Iowa.

He officially qualified for the 2011 United States Olympic Team Trials two weeks ago with a third-place finish at the New York Athletic Club International.

Valenti has been training for the U.S. world team for six years, but has yet to make it. To do so, he must be in the country’s top three at the 60 kilogram weightclass — he is currently ranked sixth. At 27 years old, this is essentially his last chance.

“I’ve wrestled with the top guys before,” Valenti said. “I’ve beaten some of them. I’ve lost to some of them. I just need to make sure I’m the best guy in the country.”

Head coach Rob Eiter likes Valenti’s chances.

“Matt’s wrestling the best he’s wrestled since I’ve been here,” he said.

Eiter should know. He served as an assistant coach at Penn from 2006-08, when he helped coach Valenti to two NCAA championships and three All-America honors before his graduation in 2007.

Now, as Valenti’s boss, Eiter has again taken on the role of mentor to his once-athlete, giving him technical pointers and ensuring that Valenti has sufficient free time to train for his goal. Eiter himself has quite a wealth of experience from which to draw. He was an alternate on the U.S. Olympic Team in 1992, and he finished in eighth place at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996.

“I’ve gone through it, I know what it takes,” Eiter said. “I wouldn’t tell him I think he can do it if I didn’t think he can.”

Valenti has certainly been putting himself in position to be successful over the past few years. He won the bronze medal at the 2009 Pan-American Championship and in May of 2010, he captured sixth place in the World Team Trials.

But how does Valenti handle the time-consuming task of Olympic training and coaching simultaneously? Even Eiter said that he sometimes must tell Valenti to “worry about himself,” and not Penn.

But Valenti claims that coaching and training are not mutually exclusive tasks. “I’ve never been someone who can just focus on one thing,” said Valenti, who also served as an assistant coach at Columbia for two years. “When I get better, I’m helping them get better.”

Penn has a rich legacy of Olympic coaches. Including Eiter, three of the past four head coaches wrestled in the Olympics. In fact, the head coach Valenti wrestled for at Penn, Zeke Jones, earned a silver medal in the 1992 Olympics.

Adding a twist to Valenti’s Olympic tryout, Jones is now the head coach of the U.S. freestyle wrestling team. If Valenti makes the squad, he would join Penn’s fine tradition of Olympic wrestlers and would once again wrestle under his collegiate coach.

“Dream big,” Eiter told Valenti. “If you don’t dream big it’ll never happen.”

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