not just football?

Staying true to the plan of alternating weeks, this week will be something about my childhood here in Happy Valley. In fact, it will be about wrestling in Happy Valley.

Penn State has always been a pretty good wrestling school. It makes sense. Pennsylvania is generally regarded by many to the be the best pipelane for premier wrestlers in the country. But although the Nittany Lions have been a regular in the Top 5 (in collegiate rankings) in the past several seasons or so, winning the NCAA championship last year, they weren’t always as dominant as they are now.

The university wasn’t maybe. But the area certainly was.

I wrestled a lot as a kid. That was my thing. So much so, in fact, that if I had wanted to wrestle in college, I could have gone to nearly any school in the country that I had wanted (but that’s neither here nor there, because I grew to hate wrestling and I’d never do that). But I wrestled, and traveled, a lot. Of the forty states that I have been to, I’ve wrestled in over half of them, in hundreds of tournament spanning over a decade.

Sure, there were national tournaments halfway across the country that were (understandably so) always pretty tough. But, as a general rule, some of my hardest competition would always be in State College.

Annually, Penn State runs one of the toughest youth wrestling tournaments around. Every year, hundreds of kids come from across the region to “duke it out” in Rec Hall. Of course, at that time, it was just another building to me. There was no history, it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing, it was just a gym. But, looking back – it’s pretty cool to think about.

That’s not my only experience of wrestling here though. That was just one weekend a year, maybe for six or seven years. But my memories extend far beyond that. Additionally, every summer I’d come up here for a week for a Penn State wrestling camp. The camp would be run inside the Ramada Inn, maybe to give the illusion of a vacation and intensive camp mixed together, I don’t know, but either way, I found myself there every summer for quite some time.

Maybe it was all just a way for my dad to spend more time up here (he came to all of it). Maybe it was nothing more than a way to connect our family life and my wrestling career. Whatever the reason, Penn State became what some could refer to as my “homefield advantage” because I was here so much. Not that I minded or anything, winning and Happy Valley were always a pretty good combo to grow up on.