Doucet gets first taste of full season

Konner Doucet hit some milestones in his collegiate wrestling career this past season at Oklahoma State, but the 2020 Comanche High School graduate is not content and wants even more.

As a redshirt sophomore, Doucet wrestled his first full varsity schedule for the Cowboys, compiling an 18-12 overall record while finishing fifth in the Big 12 Tournament and qualifying for the NCAA Tournament.

“It was a grind, but it was cool and kind of what I expected,” Doucet said during a break of the wrestling camp he was hosting in Comanche earlier this month. “Everybody thinks it’s going to be easy going out there, but it’s not that easy. I kind of figured that out toward the end and I really started clicking on some things and started figuring it out, so it was a lot of fun.”

Doucet was named to the Academic All-Big 12 team. He is majoring in agribusiness.

He went 6-1 at the Southern Scuffle that included a win over Minnesota’s Garret Joles who defeated him earlier in the season. He also avenged an earlier loss to Oklahoma’s Josh Heindselman at the home Bedlam Dual after losing in overtime in the Bedlam dual in Norman.

The NCAA Wrestling Championship was an exciting experience for Doucet. He went 0-2 in his debut, where he was the No. 20 seed. He lost a close 2-1 decision to No. 13 seed Tyrell Gordon of Northern Iowa to open the tournament to get knocked into the consolation bracket where he lost a 7-3 decision to Jaron Smith of Maryland.

 “It was cool to qualify for the NCAA,” Doucet said. “It was in Tulsa, so it was in our backyard and I really wanted to qualify. But, after the Big 12 tournament someone was asking about qualifying for the NCAA, and they were like, ‘it’s great you qualified.’ I said qualifying wasn’t ever really the goal. Nobody wants just to be an NCAA qualifier. I wanted to be an All-American and a national champion and I didn’t achieve it.”

While the outcome may have been disappointing, the experience was still good.

“It was great to go to the Big Dance and see it, but it was definitely not the outcome I wanted,” Doucet said. “The experience was good. And after a year of going through that grind of being in duals every week and wrestling those hard tournaments, going to the NCAA is a huge deal for just the experience level.”

The grind and the tough duals and the tough tournaments have not taken away his love for the sport, however.

“I still love it,” Doucet said. “That was one thing about college wrestling that my older brother told me before I even committed to wrestling in college, he said, ‘Hey, if you don’t love this sport, you’re not going to make it so you better be sure you love it.’ So, I do love it and I’m blessed to be able to do it every single day. Sometimes it sucks waking up and going at it two or three times a day, but it is what I chose to do and it’s what I love.”

And he is going to do what he loves at one of the elite wrestling programs in the country at Oklahoma State.

“I think I’m really lucky to be at Oklahoma State with the tradition that we have and the coaches,” Doucet said. “Every day we’re getting to learn from a two-time Olympic gold medalist and four-time world champion (head coach John Smith). So just learning from all the knowledge that we have in the room from the older guys, which I guess I will be coming in next year, is second to none and you can’t compare it to anything else.”