Bummed out by the collapse of the men’s basketball team this year? Still crying about Debbie Ryan and the women’s basketball team’s early exit from the NCAA Tournament? Are the ACC Championship-winning swim teams just too darn successful and consistent to be interesting?
Do I have the team for you! Virginia’s wrestling squad is more exciting and fun than the three other winter sports teams combined, and it all starts with Steve Garland, the team’s coach. At only 32 years of age, he’s the youngest varsity coach at the University, and I would argue he could pass for 21. The first time I met him, I thought he was one of the athletes.
Garland currently is my favorite person in all of Virginia athletics. He’s funny, inspiring, dedicated and compassionate. His wrestlers look up to him, and he just finished his third thrilling year as Virginia coach. I sat down with him last week to talk about this past season and his outlook for Virginia wrestling. I wish I could publish the transcript of the entire 30-minute interview; his words had me laughing one minute and choking up the next. Instead, I’ll give you some of the highlights.
Virginia’s season began with high expectations and a wrestling team firing on all cylinders. Perhaps the players fired on too many cylinders too early, or perhaps the team was just unlucky: through portions of the season’s early weeks, several wrestlers suffered injuries.
“We had a ton of injuries, more injuries than I’ve ever dealt with,” Garland said. “If you name the injury, we had it.”
Spinal damage? Check. Ruptured discs? Affirmative. The team lost seven athletes to concussions alone, Garland said.
And yet, the team battled through one of the toughest schedules in the nation. In dual meets alone, Virginia competed against seven ranked teams.
Strictly from a standings perspective, the tough schedule appears to have hurt the team. Virginia ended third to last in the ACC in conference standings and second to last in the ACC in overall record.
But, the thing is, a standings perspective is the wrong perspective to take in college wresting. More than anything else, the wrestling postseason is what’s remembered. The regular season is just a buildup. Garland and his coaching staff spend each season emphasizing the importance of NCAA championship bouts along with ACC team championship meets.
This is where Garland’s decision to put together a brutal schedule really paid off. The Cavaliers, though still ravaged by injuries, managed to clean up during the postseason. With a little bit of a chip on its shoulder and conditioned against elite teams, Virginia ended the ACC title meet with 68 points, good for a second place finish and a mere two points short of champion Maryland.
The regular season ACC champion Hokies? Runner-up Tar Heels? Both finished more than 10 points behind the Cavaliers. Though the other programs inflated their records all year long, they couldn’t put it together when it counted.
Perhaps the most amazing part of the Cavaliers’ clutch effort in the conference championship meet was that they did it without a wrestler at 125 pounds. Considering the team’s roster includes junior Ross Gitomer, the 2008 ACC champion at 125 who had to miss the meet because of an injury and easily could have racked up a few points if he had been healthy, it becomes clear just how close the Cavaliers were to walking away with the conference trophy.
“We were so excited for guys like [junior] Brent Jones, who goes out there and pins the returning third-place finisher,” Garland said.
Beyond Jones’s incredible pin, highlights of the tournament were senior Rocco Caponi — who will graduate as one of the most decorated Virginia wrestlers of the decade — securing his third ACC title and sophomore Chris Henrich winning “his first of hopefully many” ACC titles, as Garland put it.
Nonetheless, it was a bit frustrating for the team to come so excruciatingly close to a title.
“It was bittersweet,” Garland said, adding that it’s easy to “do the shoulda-woulda game” and second-guess moments leading up to the narrow loss to the Terps.
The story didn’t end for Virginia there, though. In fact, as important as the ACC Championships were to the team, the ultimate barometer for its success was how well it performed at nationals.
Virginia sent seven wrestlers to the NCAA title meet, the most in program history. Of the wrestlers who competed, the best finisher was Henrich, who ended in eighth place, high enough to earn All-American status. Placing so well nationally is in itself impressive, but for a sophomore to pull it off is almost unheard of, Garland said.
“I don’t think that this school realizes how big this is,” Garland said. How common is it for a sophomore to be selected as an All-American? “Since wrestling’s been in existence, the number is very small.”
Henrich’s phenomenal season — he set the Virginia record for wins as a sophomore — and his consistency through the tough schedule were the exception to Virginia’s up-and-down “roller-coaster” season. It was no fluke or freak occurrence, Garland said.
Henrich works out three times a day, every day, with no exception. He never uses exams or schoolwork as an excuse, yet still manages a respectable GPA with a sizable course load, Garland said.
Next year, there’s a good chance Henrich could be in the mix to win it all. He could become Virginia’s first National Champion — and as a junior, no less.
Though Henrich’s performance was the best moment at nationals for the Cavaliers, the exploits of the other six wrestlers were nothing to sneeze at. Unseeded sophomore Nick Nelson beat the No. 2 wrestler in the country in what was possibly the upset of the tournament.
After all was said and done, Virginia wrestlers at the tournament tallied enough points to give the Cavaliers the 34th overall team finish — not too shabby for a team that finished the regular season in the bottom half of the ACC, which is far from the nation’s best wrestling conference.
Perhaps an even greater testament to Garland’s ability to inspire the team was not the results at ACCs and nationals, but what happened right after the championship meets. The season finally complete, you’d expect Virginia’s tired and battered grapplers to take a well-deserved break, right? Wrong.
After six months of build-up to “the one thing people care about” in college wrestling — nationals — the team didn’t miss a beat, didn’t lose an ounce of drive. A couple days later, every single wrestler attended the first offseason practice as eager to fight as ever.
The coaching staff “really [has] a way of connecting with wrestlers on an interpersonal level in a way most coaches [do not],” Garland said.
And now the cycle starts again for the Cavaliers. First, they bring in the new recruiting class. Then, they start practicing and preparing for another painfully difficult wrestling schedule. Then, they get beat up all year long but pull things together just in time for the postseason. In his three years coaching in Charlottesville, Garland has it down to a habit.
Mark my words, though, 2009-10 is going to be different and better than the past three seasons. There’s no way Virginia will suffer from injuries the way it did in 2008-09, and the Cavaliers breakthrough as a national wrestling contender will occur this upcoming year. If the Cavaliers don’t win the ACC, I’ll eat my shoe. I’m serious, folks; as strange as it may be to watch a sport that even the coach calls “a glorified fist-fight,” I implore you to take the time to come out to a meet or two at Memorial Gym next year. Garland is on the verge of putting together something special.
The pieces are all in place. Look at the recruiting numbers: Virginia has put together a top-25 class each year since the coach was hired. So far this year, Garland said he and his recruiters have cobbled together the third-ranked class, and there is still a chance that Virginia could end up with the nation’s top class.
More than just putting together the right personnel, Garland’s program thrives because he and his coaching staff have a keen understanding of what makes a wrestling team tick. It requires coaches who do more than just “draw numbers on a board and write Xs and Os,” Garland said.
All three of Virginia’s coaches wrestle with the athletes in practice. And this isn’t just drills. It’s not some sort of dress-rehearsal for real wrestling. This is all-out brawling.
“It’s disgusting, man,” Garland joked. “I touch these guys more than I touch my own wife.”
In one of my favorite moments of the interview, Garland hopped up and started reenacting some of the wrestling moves he and his coaches recently survived and then, hilariously, pantomimed what it would look like if coaches in other sports participated in practice.
Do you see Coach K playing point in an offense and taking free throws with the Blue Devils? Do you see Virginia swimming coach Mark Bernardino hop into the pool and challenge someone to a 100-yard butterfly? Not usually. Garland’s coaching is more than just tactics. Through bruises, blood, sweat and tears, he earns his team’s success — or, rather, pushes his team to earn its success itself, blow by blow.
The result is something rare and spectacular: a sports team that never has more than one athlete playing at the same time, but really operates like a team. Virginia wrestling is not just a series of individuals. There’s real team chemistry.
“It’s twisted, man! That’s why we’re so tight,” Garland said. “Maybe even to a fault.”
I see no fault in it. By forging such a tightly knit core of wrestlers and staff, he’s developed a healthy and synergistic environment. You can see it at the meets, you hear it in the athletes’ voices and Garland acknowledges it: Each student-athlete feeds off of the success of the others.
“When a guy makes a huge win, there’s momentum,” Garland said. “Even though there’s only one guy on the mat at a time.”
As for the sport of wrestling itself, and the University community’s interest in it, Garland is optimistic that it’s on the upswing.
“Maybe I’m being too positive, but I sure hope it’s grown,” Garland said.
I’d say so. From finishing as a national runner-up while attending the University — and becoming the first member of his family to go to college in the process — a decade ago, to scheduling as a coach home meets against powerhouse programs like then-No. 2 Iowa State in 2007, to filling up the stands thanks to marketing to students, to organizing youth wrestling camps and programs, Garland has done and continues to do his part to raise the credibility of Virginia as a wrestling school. It’s paying off.
Garland ended the interview with some remarks about the growth of the sport’s popularity, but he may as well have been discussing the team’s success or his coaching philosophy.
“If you’re doing nothing, nothing happens,” he said. “But if you’re working at it, and things are happening, then obviously there’s gotta be a positive movement. Maybe it’s an inch, but at least it’s moving forward.”
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