Dan Bloom ’10 and Greg Hurd ’10 are headed to the NCAA Division III Wrestling Championships after a pair of dominant performances in the New England Wrestling Association (NEWA) Championships, which were held Saturday and Sunday at Springfield College. Bloom went 5-1 and was the 125-pound champion, while Hurd was a wild-card selection after making it to the finals at 174. As a team, Wesleyan finished sixth of 15 teams with 75.5 team points, just 0.5 points behind fifth-place Southern Maine.

Bloom won his opening match of the tournament before being upset by Johnson & Wales freshman James Soprano in his second bout, 8-4. Bloom, however, rebounded to win his final four matches for the title, rolling past a pair of adversaries from M.I.T. and Roger Williams before a rematch with Soprano. He avenged the earlier loss with a pin to send Soprano back to the construction site and advance to the finals against Williams’ Ethan Cohen. The two foes had met twice earlier in the season, with Bloom taking a 3-1 decision in the Doug Parker Invitational at Springfield and Cohen avenging the defeat with a 7-2 victory in the team’s season-ending dual match. Bloom emerged from the rubber bout with a 3-0 victory for the 127-pound title and NCAA berth.

174-pounder Greg Hurd had a similarly strong tournament. After a pair of pins, Hurd defeated Springfield’s Victor Sanziale to set up a bout with Johnson & Wales senior Jerome Owens, the nation’s top-ranked 174-pound wrestler. Owens emerged with a 9-4 win, but Hurd won his next match to set up a rematch with Owens. The second bout ended similarly to the first, with Owens rolling to an 8-4 victory. Hurd, however, received one of four wild-card berths to the NCAA Championships.

Bloom and Hurd were far from the only Cardinals with strong showings in the tournament. Josh Berkovic ’10 finished second in the 165-pound weight class, going 5-2 and making an appearance in the title bout. After an opening loss, Berkovic won five straight matches to make it to the championship match, where he fell to top-seeded Mike Morin of Southern Maine, 12-7.

Wesleyan’s total of three finalists was the second highest in the tournament, eclipsed only by team champion Williams, which had four finalists. Runner-up Johnson & Wales also had three individual finalists. The last time the Cardinals had three representatives in the finals was 1986, when they finished fifth of 14 teams in the tournament. The highest number of finalists in team history is six, a total reached in the 1983-84 season, when Wesleyan finished first at the Championships (out of 15 teams) as part of a 14-2-1 season.

A handful of other grapplers also placed for Wesleyan at the tournament. Heavyweight Dan Conroy ’11 went 4-2 for a third-place finish and Dave Bachy ’10 finished fifth at 149 pounds with a 3-2 record. Chris Alvanos ’11 (133 pounds, 2-2 record), Vin deLalla ’11 (141 pounds, 2-2 record), Tom Oddo ’12 (157 pounds, 1-2 record), Zach Rolfe ’10 (184 pounds, 1-2 record) and Alex Segal ’09 (197 pounds, 0-2 record) also competed for Wesleyan but did not place.

Wesleyan’s sixth-place finish was a three-spot improvement from 2007-08; the Cardinals finished ninth of 15 teams with 40.5 team points last season. Wesleyan also had the second-highest team GPA in the NEWA.

The NCAA Championships will be held March 6-7 at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The last Wesleyan wrestler to qualify for Nationals was Dan deLalla ’07, who was seeded seventh and made it to the quarterfinals in 2006-07. Wesleyan finished 44th of 63 teams in the Championships that year with two team points.