Traveling seems to be the theme in the first two months of the season for the SF State wrestling team.

Over the next couple months the Gator wrestlers will travel to four different states, participate in several tournaments and face plenty of Division I competition before its home-opener on Jan. 24.

Last week, in what was supposed to be the home-opener, SF State traveled to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to open up the 2008-09 season in a duel-meet against the first of many of its D-I opponents.

The Gators fell to the Mustangs by a score of 26-13 on Saturday afternoon.

“We lost, but that’s a good thing because we found out all the things we’re doing wrong right now," Curtis Schurkamp said.

"It’s going to be a good practice because we’re going to fix all the mistakes we made.”

This match was scheduled to be the home-opener for SF State after last year's meeting was in San Luis Obispo as both schools agreed to alternating home sites every year. But the D-I school dictates the schedule and moved it back to Cal Poly, SF State head coach Lars Jensen said.

For the wrestling team, travel is very familiar as the team will compete in an out-of-state conference schedule, which includes butting heads with most of the top non-conference local D-I schools away from SF State.

The Gators took the early lead in the match after senior Curtis Schurkamp, ranked No. 1 in the preseason coaches’ poll, received a forfeit because Cal Poly didn’t have a 125-pound wrestler for him to face.

In the next match, freshman Naveed Bagheri got the first win for SF State and the first of his career after he defeated Jake Tanenbaum in the 133-pound class in a major decision, 12-2.

“Naveed did very well," Jensen said. "He goes out there against a highly touted freshman from Kansas and controls the whole match and gets a major decision."

The Gators built a 10-0 lead only to see it collapse after Cal Poly came back to win the next seven matches.

In the 184-pound division, senior Marcus Gales dueled with Ryan Smith into overtime, and Gales had the match won until Smith pulled off an escape with seconds left to take the match, 6-4.

“Strategy-wise he needs to be a little more conservative and let the match play out,” Jensen said. “But all of our guys were aggressive, took shots and looked good.”

In the final match of the afternoon, junior Steve Franklin, continued to build on last year's success of making it to nationals, beat Kelan Bragg by a 7-2 decision in the heavyweight class.

Overall, Jensen felt his team didn’t perform as well as he hoped and said he would focus on mat strategy, improving technique and getting off bottom over the next week of practice.

“It’s basically poor technique we need to work on. Bad habits brought over from high school or junior college. When you go against Division I guys they are going to exploit those bad habits,” Jensen said.

The Gators will take the six-hour road trip to participate in a tournament in Oregon on Saturday then they will turn around and make the trip down to Stanford to face off against its second D-I school in Stanford on Wednesday.

The schedule only gets tougher for SF State as they will travel to Nevada, back to Oregon, and over to Illinois the day after Christmas, for three tournaments all in the month of December.

However Jensen isn’t worried how his team will overcome all the travel as he just wants to see his team get better as they go along.

“Three months from now these guys will be totally different wrestlers. Everybody’s a little rusty. I’d say the measuring mark is about 20 matches and then you start to figure it out,” Jensen said.

The Gators travel to Oregon for the Best of the West Wrestling Tournament hosted by Southern Oregon University on Saturday.