Penn State looking to add long-sought second national wrestling title

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Since no Penn State wrestling team - or, for that matter, any other Eastern team - has captured one since, you'd think the Nittany Lions' 1953 national championship trophy would be a sacred relic here.

You'd be wrong.

"I'd have to check . . . but I'm assuming it's in our all-sports museum," said a sports information official when asked its whereabouts.

"I don't know if I've even seen the trophy," said wrestling coach Cael Sanderson.

"Trophy? We won the championship in 1953?" asked wrestler Frank Molinaro. "Wow, I didn't even know that."

That collective unawareness is understandable when you consider how hard Penn State has been working to add that long-sought second national title. Ranked from 2 to 4 in the national polls, the Nittany Lions will get their chance starting Thursday, when the 2011 NCAA wrestling championships begin in Philadelphia.

"Ultimately," Sanderson said, "these guys want to win a championship badly."

There's been something of a wrestling renaissance here in Happy Valley, where two of the last three dual meets - against Iowa and Wisconsin - attracted frenzied, standing-room-only crowds to Rec Hall.

Briefly ranked No. 1, Big Ten champ for a first time, coached by perhaps the greatest collegiate wrestler ever, able to lure top recruits from its talent-rich home state, Penn State figures to seriously challenge Cornell, Iowa, and Oklahoma State next week at the Wells Fargo Center.

And with a roster loaded with underclassmen stars, they'll likely be a contender for the foreseeable future.

"The cool thing about Penn State is they've always been in the top five in terms of attendance," said Sanderson, the Iowa State legend who is finishing his second season as the highest-profile coach in program history. "So as we start to have more and more success, it's just going to continue to grow. The level of wrestling here [in Pennsylvania], the culture of wrestling here, and the support Penn State fans in general have for their teams has been tremendous."

His young Nittany Lions followed a 17-1-1 regular season by winning the school's first Big Ten title last weekend at Northwestern, edging three-time defending national champ Iowa by a single point. It was Iowa that on Jan. 30 handed them their lone loss.

Five Penn State wrestlers - sophomore Andrew Long (133), junior Frank Molinaro (149), redshirt freshman David Taylor (157), freshman Ed Ruth (176), and sophomore Quentin Wright (184) - won individual Big Ten titles.

The Nittany Lions also swept the conference's yearly honors: Sanderson was coach of the year, Taylor the best wrestler and best freshman, and Wright, who won despite a No. 9 seed, the outstanding wrestler at the tournament.

And next week, in their home state's largest city and with eligible wrestlers in eight of the NCAA's 10 weight classes, Sanderson's team will try to do what none from the East has accomplished in more than a half-century.

To leave Philadelphia with another championship trophy, they will need to overcome deeper, more experienced squads from Iowa, Cornell, and Oklahoma State.

"We're well aware of who our competition is, individually and as a team," said Sanderson. "But it's not something we're going to focus on. We have no ill feelings toward any other team. We don't want any other team to do poorly. We've got to go and do the best for ourselves."

He has had no trouble selling that notion to his team. If his athletes don't know anything more about their coach than they do the '53 trophy, they can Google Sanderson. What they'd find might floor them.

A Salt Lake City native, Sanderson, 31, won four consecutive NCAA titles (1999-20002) and all 159 of his collegiate matches at Iowa State. His alma mater's head coach for three years before coming here, he led the Cyclones to three Big Twelve titles and a runner-up spot in an NCAA tourney.

But Iowa State couldn't compete with Iowa, where another Iowa State expatriate legend, Dan Gable, had built that program into the nation's best. So when Penn State called, he answered.

Surprisingly, for a wrestler whose intensity and focus were surreal, Sanderson's coaching style is relaxed - at least by the sport's rugged, flinty-eyed standards.

"Coach does a great job of keeping the pressure off us," said Molinaro, who grew up in Barnegat, N.J. "He never talks about winning. It's always about giving your best effort."

Ruth described his coach as "really cool."

"He's not like some who make you drill, drill, drill and tell you that you have to wrestle, wrestle, wrestle," said Ruth. "He's more strategic."

Sanderson encourages his wrestlers to play various games during practices - including one where they try to land a medicine ball in a mat's circle. Even when Iowa, the sport's corn-fed behemoth, came to Rec Hall for that January dual meet won by the Hawkeyes, he tried to dial down the hype.

"There was a lot heaped on our team pretty quickly that week," he said. "On Tuesday it was announced that we were the No. 1 team in the country. There was a lot of hype in addition to it being a big match. We had to try to use it as a learning experience."

"As a competitor, I was always intense. But I was relaxed and focused at the same time. What I try to share with kids is the big-picture stuff. It's just a game. We want to win real bad . . . But it's a game, win or lose. It's that simple. You have to keep the right perspective. It's not life and death or anything crazy like that. It's a fun opportunity and you get a chance to compete and be the best."

In that Iowa loss, Penn State's lighter wrestlers - typically the team's strength - were beaten in the early matches, the resulting 12-0 hole too deep for the rest of the team to escape, and the Hawkeyes triumphed, 22-13.

"We needed a little magic, we needed something to happen," Sanderson said. "We didn't create any magic. We could wrestle the same dual tomorrow and it could be reversed, but you have to seize the moment. We didn't have 10 guys who fought."

He came to Penn State determined to fight for the state's top talent - which typically has been divided among Pennsylvania's numerous Division I programs and the top national powers. He landed Ruth from Harrisburg and hotly recruited twins Andrew and Dylan Alton from nearby Mill Hall. Overall, 26 of the 35 wrestlers on Penn State's roster are homegrown.

"The potential of getting a good chunk of the best wrestlers from Pennsylvania is going to do great things for our program," Sanderson said. "The kids from Pennsylvania have been spread out all over the place for a really long time. There are a lot of them, far more than we could ever come close to keeping in our program. But there are 15 Division I programs here that spread it out and there also are teams from all over the country that recruit here.

"Pennsylvania wrestlers have had a huge impact on the sport of wrestling. It just hasn't been all together on one team in Pennsylvania. We've had some great teams here, but not national champions."

Not since 1953, when, with 53 schools represented, host Penn State won the national title in Rec Hall. Philadelphia, Sanderson said, would be a fitting locale for a second.

"There would be no better place, except State College itself, to win a national championship," he said. "But it's going to come down to each individual, when he steps on the mat, doing what he knows how to do best. And doing it well."

And should that be good enough to produce a Lions title, no one is likely to misplace this trophy.