The NCAA wrestling tournament begins tomorrow at the Scottrade Center in St. Louis. One of the participants will be Pomona’s own Jonny Bonilla-Bowman. Bonilla-Bowman, a redshirt junior from Hofstra, is making his third NCAA appearance.
He recently claimed his second Colonial Athletic Association championship at 157 pounds. In two years at Hofstra he has two championships, and Hofstra has won its seventh and eighth consecutive team titles. The latest was in hostile territory in Chesapeake, Virginia. The gym was filled with Old Dominion fans.
“They had posters all over the gym saying they were going to break our win streak,” he said.
I spoke to him yesterday after trying to reach him for several days. He was sick with a cold and cough and holed up in his room. He finally got back to lifting on Sunday and returned to the practice mat on Monday.
He’s not worried about the quick turnaround before the tournament. Before the CAA tournament he was out for weeks with torn cartilage between his floating ribs. The tournament was his first match back. Didn’t seem to hurt him.
His first opponent is Joseph Knox of Chattanooga, also a redshirt junior. Knox, ranked 27th by WrestlingReport.com, is 16-10. Bonilla-Bowman, ranked 14th by the website, is 22-7. Both are unseeded. Win and he will likely face undefeated No. 2 seed Michael Poeta of Illinois.
“The national tournament is a very long and very competitive tournament,” Hofstra coach Tom Shifflet said. “Every match is gonna be tough. John has worked hard this season and can do some great things at the tournament. There’s no promises. Everybody that goes into this thing knows there’s no promises no matter how hard you work. It just has to be your weekend.”
Bonilla-Bowman lost in the quarterfinals last year, then lost his first wrestleback.
Coming out of East Ramapo’s wrestling program, he was an All-American after placing third in states and seventh in nationals. He was 125-10 with 73 falls over his career. He chose to attend Virginia Tech, where he redshirted 2006 and won an ACC championship in 2007. However, that April was the infamous Va Tech shooting that left 33 people dead. Combine that with the fact that coach Tom Brands had earlier left the school to coach Iowa, the most storied program in college wrestling, and Bonilla-Bowman decided to move on.
He wrestled under new coach Kevin Dresser and his staff for one season, but “they weren’t the ones that I went there for.” He transferred to Hofstra, which had been one of his top choices coming out of high school.
You can watch the NCAA quarterfinals live at 11 a.m. on ESPNU and ESPN360.com, and the semifinals at 7 p.m. on ESPN2, ESPNU and ESPN360.com. The semifinals will be telecast in a side-by-side format, allowing viewers to see both semifinal matches in each weight class at the same time, both on ESPNU and ESPN2.
ESPNU will telecast the Championship Medal Round on Saturday, March 21, at 10:30 a.m., and the Finals at 6:30 p.m. on ESPN. During the Finals, two referees per match each will wear a microphone, providing fans with even more access to and understanding of the action.
6 Comments
jonny’s the man, he never quits in a match hope he dose well
Good luck JBB! Get on that podium this year.
Coach Rogers
It would be fun to see Jonny have a good tourney this year. I hope he does well. Did any of you get to see Jonny wrestle in high school?
Yes I did, he was an absolute force and probably the best wrestler in Section 1, pound for pound, during my career (2002-06). He won the unified sectionals as a sophomore at 140 lbs in 2003, an extremely difficult feat, and actually almost killed the kid he wrestled in the finals (I mean that literally; the kid was from Somers I think and was no scrub). He took 4th in states his junior year and gave Trevor Chinn possibly his hardest match of the state tourney in the semis; Chinn, for those who don’t know, is probably one of the top ten wrestlers to come out of the state in this decade (that would be a fun debate to have though). His senior year he took third, but only because they didn’t have seeding back then. The real state title match was his semifinal against Ryan Patrovich from Long Island, another of the top wrestlers to come out of the state this decade (and now his teammate at Hofstra). Patrovich was a 3-time national finalist in HS and his state title in ‘05 was his second. He only defeated Bonilla-Bowman in the waning seconds of the match and won by a single point I think.
I haven’t been able to see the new batch of wrestlers that have risen the section to such new heights, outside of a few finals matches from this year (Realbuto, Rodriguez, Flamio and Brundage; I didn’t get to see Grippi and Murayama), so I don’t know how he stacks up against them. But in my opinion he was better than both Colagiovanni brothers, Einfrank, Tortora, Clarke, El-Hag, Cuculo (who was the second best I saw), CJ Rodriguez, Paswall, Misfud Mike Martinez (who, when his heart was in it, was unbelievable), Zurla, Oddo (didn’t see his senior year) and Berkowitz (who never got the respect he deserved because he wrestled D2). That’s a long list of elite wrestlers, all of them all state I believe (save for Misfud, who was screwed by the lack of wild cards), and Bonilla-Bowman was better than them all.
On that note, though, I was wondering if any of you know how any of the above have been doing in college, if they are wrestling at the next level. It’s tough to keep a beat on them.
One other note on Bonilla-Bowman, all of the other wrestlers that I mentioned above came from elite teams, except for Clarke (Greeley is terrible now but back then there were multiple state placers on the team), and all the Westchester guys had the ability to train at ISW. Bonilla-Bowman came from an East Ramapo program that, while certainly good, is not a powerhouse, and despite that he would have had two state titles with slightly better draws.
I agree he was some machine never stopped. I remember watching him and Martinez in a war at the Pearl River tournament that was some match I think you said it correct when Martinez was on he was tough to beat I remember him making it look easy to take Bowman down and then the following year do it to Marinelli at Super 16 and the following at Super 16 to Mifsud but as far as gas, and the mentality to wrestle for more then 6 minutes if needed Bowman was the man good luck at Nationals.