Without an upcoming match this weekend, the Northwestern wrestling team has time to heal, both mentally and physically.

And it needs it.

The Wildcats suffered two losses on the road this weekend — falling to No. 10 Penn State 42-3 on Friday night and No. 19 Ohio State 40-3 on Sunday. NU won just one match in each competition.

“We’ve been pushing these guys pretty hard since September, wrestling-wise, running-wise and mentally getting them prepared for each of their matches,” coach Tim Cysewski said. “It’s always good to be able to do all that without having to worry about competition on the weekend. It’s never really off your mind, but they can relax a little bit.”

Cysewski said he had high expectations for the team this weekend. He said he thought NU (9-7, 0-6 Big Ten) matched up well in four or five contests with both Penn State (10-4, 3-2) and Ohio State (7-7. 3-2).

“We weren’t as sharp as we should have been,” Cysewski said. “We lost some matches we should have won.”

Victories in some matches, though, weren’t meant to be. Senior Mike Little competed against the two top heavyweights in the country. He was pinned in 2:45 by Penn State’s second-ranked Pat Cummins and lost 23-7 to the nation’s first-ranked heavyweight, Ohio State’s Tommy Rowlands.

Junior John Ott also had a tough weekend, getting pinned in both of his matches. Cysewski said Ott got caught in a front headlock roll-through, a move that can be fatal to a wrestler’s hopes of victory.

“Ott’s going to come back spitting iron,” junior John Velez (125 pounds) said. “He’s a performer. He just got a little unlucky.”

The matches were Ott’s third and fourth this season; he was out for 10 months with a neck injury.

Freshman Nick Hayes and junior Mike Kimberlin were the only two Cats to win a match.

Hayes (165 pounds) won 6-4 against his Penn State opponent but lost 9-2 in Columbus, Ohio, to John Clark, a fifth-year senior and All-American in 2003. Hayes, the only true freshman in NU’s lineup, was undefeated in Big Ten competition until this loss brought him to 5-1.

“Nick Hayes has been doing a fantastic job all year as a true freshman,” Cysewski said. “We battled (Clark) tooth and nail. We learned a lot from that and we’ll get better because of that.”

Kimberlin (157 pounds) won 4-1 over Ohio State’s Ryan Rhodes.

“We figured he would win, he should and he did it,” Cysewski said. “Mike is a good enough athlete that he’ll win those.”

With Big Tens just one month away, these losses clearly show that both the coaches and wrestlers have some work to do, Cysewski said.

For the coaches, the next 30 days are for focusing workouts on the 10 Cats who will be competing. The top NU wrestler from each of the 10 weight classes will wrestle in the year’s most important meets.

And for the wrestlers, its time to start perfecting their game.

“We came out thinking that we need to work a lot harder and we really need to start making strides,” Velez said. “We only have 30 days left — in 30 days we’ll know if we made it to nationals or not. We have 30 days to make the improvements we need.”