Cal State Fullerton Notebook / Robyn Norwood : Millsap Usually Gets Titan Wrestlers Off to Good Start

Like a grade-schooler whose last name begins with A, Erin Millsap is used to going first.

That is the province of 118-pound wrestlers. As the lightest, their matches are the first of a meet, beginning a crescendo that ends with the heavyweights.

Millsap, a sophomore, has been setting a good precedent for Cal State Fullerton this season. He has won 20 matches, lost 4 and tied 1. That record has earned him a No. 17 national ranking by the Amateur Wrestling News.

Millsap is one of two Fullerton wrestlers who are nationally ranked. The other, sophomore heavyweight David Jones, is ranked fifth with a 20-3-1 record.

The unlikely combination--Jones, at 250, weighs more than twice as much as Millsap--has become the wrestling team’s version of bookends.

“I bring (the fans) in, he keeps ‘em around to the end,” said Millsap, who was born in Saigon in 1968. Millsap’s parents married after meeting while his father was a U.S. Marine in Vietnam.

Millsap, who went 40-0 and won a state championship as a senior at Simi Valley South Hills High School in 1986, not only wrestles in the lightest class, but he is even smaller than most of his opponents.

Many of them naturally weigh around 130 pounds, but diet and sweat off the weight to get down to 118. Millsap, whose weight is steady at 118, is a rare sort, a wrestler who doesn’t have to watch his diet.

What he lacks in size, he makes up for in strength, speed, good technical skills and a quality he calls “slickness.”

“That’s when you’re smooth,” he said. “You get them reacting and that way you can use a move where there’s no resistance.”

Millsap said he has always cast himself as a little guy with something to prove. But with the ranking--his first in the top 20--that will be changing.

“I was always the underdog,” Millsap said. “I’d rather prey on sympathy than have to go out there and be No. 1. . . . Now I’m going to have to get past that.”

No. 17 might well be only the beginning.

“I think he could be one of the top three wrestlers in nationals,” said Dan Lewis, Fullerton’s coach. “Of course, he has to get to nationals first.”

Millsap has his own goal.

“I want to be All-America before I finish,” he said. “You have to place in the top eight at nationals for that. I think it’s very possible.”

Millsap had a good season his freshman year, going 22-13.

The difference this year, Lewis said, is confidence.

During the summer, Millsap won the freestyle and Greco-Roman championships in the Espoir championships, a national under-20 competition. He was the first wrestler to win both of the events, which are very different styles of wrestling.

He also finished third in the Junior World Championships in Athens, a competition he remembers chiefly for beating the second-place finisher.

“I pinned the Russian!” Millsap said.

This summer, he will have grown too old for those competitions, and will move into the international competitions for which he will need to change weight classes. The choices are 114 1/2 and 125 1/2.

“I’ll have to decide,” Millsap said. “But you know everybody loses weight to get down, so I’d better go 114. . . . But I don’t like to lose weight. Nobody likes not eating.”

By mid-afternoon Tuesday, Coach John Sneed already had watched the tape of the Titans’ 66-63 loss to Nevada Las Vegas Monday twice.

“It was very tough to sleep after a loss like that,” Sneed said. “I watched it late last night and again today.”

The Titans came from 14 points down with 10 minutes left to tie the score with 11 seconds left on Cedric Ceballos’ 3-point shot. But UNLV’s Greg Anthony pushed the ball upcourt and banked in a 23-foot shot from the top of the key with 3 seconds left, spoiling Fullerton’s bid for overtime and its chance for its first victory in the Thomas & Mack Center.

Most commentary on the game focused on UNLV’s struggles, but Sneed claimed some of the credit for that for the Titans.

“I definitely thought it was a game of defense,” he said. “I thought our defense gave them some trouble. At the same time, there was no doubt that their defense gave us trouble.”

The Fullerton defense Sneed referred to is the Titans’ matchup zone, unveiled against UC Santa Barbara and played for about 35 minutes against UNLV.

“I decided 2 weeks ago in a major decision that the heart and soul of our defense was going to go from man-to-man to matchup,” Sneed said. “I didn’t want to make major changes when I came in, but at the same time I had to realize that with our inability to match up (in a man defense) and fatigue (because of lack of depth), this is what we needed.”