USA Wrestling Heads to State College Spotlight

There are wrestling hotbeds throughout the United States and while most know of the tradition of Iowa and Oklahoma State collegiately, there’s always been one place where the sport’s heartbeat pumps faster and louder than others – Pennsylvania.

It’s the region that develops as many elite wrestlers as there are trees throughout the commonwealth. Perhaps no more is the sport more embedded than in Central Pennsylvania, where towns with only a few stoplights — and some with none — don’t wait for football to start each school year. They wait for wrestling season.

That extends to State College, which most may think of it as the home of Penn State football but where for men’s wrestling, there is a dynasty the likes of which may be unparalleled. The Nittany Lions recently captured the NCAA team championship with a record 172.5 points, an almost impossible-to-comprehend 100 points ahead of second-place Cornell. In the 13 years since USA Wrestling legend Cael Sanderson took over as head coach, Penn State has won 11 team championships.

The Nittany Lions do not just dominate on the collegiate scene. The Nittany Lion Wrestling Club is the most well-known of the local clubs. But several others are in the region, making State College the epicenter of the USA Wrestling scene as well. It made sense four years ago when the Olympic Trials for wrestling were scheduled to be held in State College … until the pandemic happened, forcing a relocation to Texas.

In the time that has passed, USA Wrestling has become one of the best teams in the world right as Penn State continues its collegiate dominance. This month, the Trials come to Pennsylvania for only the second time ever and for the first time to Happy Valley.

“We’re excited about going there this year,” USA Wrestling Executive Director Rich Bender said. “The intensity around that program from a fan perspective and relevancy perspective within the sport is higher probably than it was four years ago. We made good on our promise to bring the Olympic Trials to State College and it’s going to be fun to work alongside a university and program that’s so positively influenced Team USA.”

The Epicenter of Domination

“The wrestling culture around here in Happy Valley is unparalleled anywhere else,” said Eric Engelbarts, executive director of the Happy Valley Sports & Entertainment Alliance. “Once the athletes get out of the Penn State program, a lot of them don’t leave. People want to hang out here even when they’re done.”

“I’m sure there’s probably some extra anticipation around the athletes that live and train in that community that it’s home ice for them and arguably it’ll be the most important event in a lot of the athletes lives,” Bender added. “This is what they’ve been working for and toward.”

Centre County has experience with major events that draw big crowds thanks to Penn State football, which almost always sells out Beaver Stadium’s listed capacity of 106,572. The wrestling trials are almost a complete sellout and have been for months with only a few tickets left. And the coordination of having to find room blocks means a lot of communication between hotel properties and other stakeholders.

Engelbarts noted that the county has 2,500 rooms to accommodate athletes, coaches, parents, media and others required to be at the event. “There is a lot of communication back and forth to ensure that parents coming in from across the country are going to be able to have a room for them to be able to watch their child compete,” he said. “The hotels are used to that around here, especially on a football weekend.”

In addition to the Nittany Lion Wrestling Club, which has been around for decades, several of the recently decorated NCAA and Olympic medalists who went to Penn State have launched training facilities in the region. State College is home to a U.S. Olympic Regional Training Center as well, giving multiple locations for regional youth to practice the sport. Now, they’ll be able to see the elite of USA Wrestling up close.
“These are athletes that are going to be competing in the Olympics,” said Engelbarts, who has a son that recently caught the wrestling bug. “And you hope to think that someday one of the kids that are walking around will see that and want to be inspired to be able to go to that level and know that it is possible.”

The Trials in wrestling may be one of the most difficult events in the world for the sport. In men’s 74K, only one of the following will advance to Paris: Jordan Burroughs, a 2012 Olympic gold medalist and six-time world champion at two different weights, or Kyle Dake, a 2020 bronze medalist and four-time world champion.

“If you don’t get excited about the U.S. Olympic Wrestling Trials, there’s something wrong with you,” Bender said. But on the same note, he admits, “to really understand and comprehend the investment and the sacrifice that these men and women make every day to get to the level that they are and realizing that we’re going to come out of that event with 18 happy folks and the rest, it’s going to be in some cases the end of their wrestling careers. It’s really emotional.”

Big Expectations in Paris

“There’s not much of a doubt that Team USA is the No. 1 team on the planet collectively,” Bender said, adding “it’s not a stretch to say that wrestling’s in its golden age.”

The numbers back it up for USA Wrestling. The national governing body has grown by 80,000 members in the past two years. In the current men’s freestyle rankings, the U.S. has eight wrestlers ranked in the top five in their weight classes with three at No. 1 — Dake in 74K, David Taylor at 86K and Kyle Snyder at 97K. Taylor won a gold medal at Tokyo and Snyder won silver and Dake bronze as part of the men’s overall five-medal haul.

“We’re excited to host it,” said Taylor, a two-time NCAA national champion at Penn State who still trains in State College. “It’s something that wrestling fans have looked forward to for four years. Penn State is the mecca of wrestling, especially at the collegiate level. There’s a mystique and aura to what happens here. People in this town are very excited.”

Taylor came to Penn State in 2009 and never left, competing with the Nittany Lion Wrestling Club. “It’s a unique environment,” he said Tuesday. “This year there’s a good chance I’ll have to wrestle a teammate to make Paris. There’s not a day I can go into my practice room and take it for granted because there’s so many young, hungry wrestlers. It’s sink or swim.”

In the women’s world rankings, the U.S. has six in the top five of their respective weight classes including Amit Elor at No. 1 in 72K (which is not an Olympic weight). In Tokyo, U.S. women won a total of four medals. And the women’s college wrestling scene has continued to develop with the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics recommending Divisions I, II and III sponsor legislation to add a national collegiate women’s wrestling championship starting in 2026.

“We’re going to go into Paris and every single weight class that we’re qualified at with no other expectation than to medal,” Bender said. “We feel like we’re in a good place to do that.”

The U.S. women also have qualified in every weight class in Paris, which coach Terry Steiner said is a major positive ahead of the Trials.

“It helps us just focus on the task at hand,” Steiner said at the U.S. Olympic Media Summit this week in New York City ahead of the Trials. “We feel we have a team that can compete with anyone and that’s exactly what we want to do.”

Steiner also feels the same emotions as Bender as to the pressure of the Trials for athletes: “I try to avoid the athletes going in. I kind of step aside and step away and avoid all of them. You want to be impartial and unbiased and let them go do their job.”

Wrestling will be staged August 5–11 at Grand Palais Éphémère in Champ de Mars with 12 men’s classes, six in freestyle and six in Greco-Roman, plus six women’s classes. Wrestling has been at every modern Olympic Summer Games, except Paris 1900, but nearly was dropped from the program a decade ago before a series of governance changes at United World Wrestling saved its spot in the Games.

“Our sport is better today,” Bender said. “I’m really proud of the sport and leadership at the international level that took that challenge seriously and made changes that we’re enjoying today. There’s a transparency around officiating and there’s an inclusion around men and women in the sport that didn’t exist before 2013.”

With a highly anticipated Trials in a wrestling hotbed, more talent than ever coming through the pipeline and with expectations of competing for medals in Paris, the stage will be set for USA Wrestling not only this summer but already with an eye toward the next Games in 2028 in Los Angeles.

“You just throw rocket fuel on (the growth) when you think about how the next Olympics are going to be at home in L.A.,” Bender said. “And we want to go in there with the momentum that we’re enjoying right now. So, there are a lot of reasons to be pretty fired up.”