There Are More Good Wrestling Schools Than You Might Think
When I ask the average sports fan to name some good wrestling schools, I invariably hear names like Iowa, Iowa State and Oklahoma State.
While there is no doubt that these schools have some of the strongest wrestling programs in the country, there are many other great wrestling schools that most people would either never associate with the sport or have never heard of, period.
Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, for instance, is a small school that has one of the top 10 wrestling programs in the country on a regular basis. As a sports writer, I have covered two state champion high school wrestlers that signed with Lehigh, one of whom was nationally-ranked and had Olympic aspirations.
Cal Poly is another example of one of those strong wrestling schools that not many people think about when they talk about the sport. They are usually among the top 25 schools in the country, and have several wrestlers considered to be among the best in their respective weight classes.
Another school that usually has a few individual wrestlers ranked among the elite Division I competitors in the country is Bucknell University.
Moving over to the Ivy League, Cornell is considered to be a wrestling powerhouse, and the remarkable thing about that is that the Ivy League is really not considered that competitive among Division I colleges and universities in most of the major sports with the notable exception of hockey. Harvard and Penn have also produced some good wrestlers.
Edinboro (and no, I am not talking about Scotland) is another wrestling school in Pennsylvania that produces some of the best wrestling talent in the country.
When most of us think about athletic talent in the state of Michigan, we think of the University of Michigan or Michigan State, right? Not this year; the best of the wrestling schools from the Wolverine state this year is Central Michigan.
I have often wondered why you see schools that have some of the stronger wrestling programs in the country that you rarely hear about in other sports, and I think the answer is actually pretty simple. Some schools simply do not have the resources to produce strong athletic programs in multiple sports like the University of Texas, Florida, USC, LSU or Alabama, so they focus on one sport.
You can see the same thing in baseball with Pepperdine University or Wichita State, or in basketball with Duke University or Gonzaga.
There are a number of good wrestling schools out there that the average sports fan has never heard of, or maybe had no idea that they were so strong in the sport. The important thing, however, is that fans of the sport of wrestling and wrestlers themselves know about them, and you better believe that wrestlers would consider it an honor and a privilege to be a part of those programs.