The Emperor's New Shoes
The U.Va. wrestling team ascends to ACC No. 1
by TIM FOLEY (COL '03, EDUC '05)
WHO?
Tim Foley was a member of the Virginia wrestling team from 1999-2004, earning All-America honors in 2004. He is now a staff writer for InterMat Wrestlingand a frequent contributor toFIGHT! Magazine. He lives in Chicago.
The University of Virginia's men's wrestling program, behind the conference titles of Chris Henrich and Mike Salopek, won the ACC wrestling tournament last month in Raleigh. While conference championships are an accomplishment for any program, they can sometimes go unnoticed in an athletic department recently silly with success (men's soccer won NCAA's and men's lacrosse, men's tennis, and baseball have each been ranked No. 1 in the nation). The wrestling team's conference championship was more significant because it was the first team title in 33 years.
So why 2010? How did a team that was picked by journalists (that's me) to finish an inconsequential third in the ACC walk away with the team title?
The answer is head coach Steve Garland.
Chris Henrich.
I met Garland when I was a first-year at Virginia. He was a fifth-year, hosting one of his impromptu story times in the practice room, where guys on the team would stretch out on the wrestling mats after a workout and listen to hysterical half-truths and exaggerations about what it meant to be a college wrestler. Garland would tell stories about everything from weight cutting to social life. Never once was he short of completely entertaining.
Steve Garland wrestling in 2000.
As a teammate he was emotional, at times cantankerous, but mostly he was focused and charismatic. Despite a bevy of attention-soliciting quirks and an outgoing persona, by Oct. 1 of the 1999-2000 season he'd eliminated partying, beer and pizza. He replaced them with television, Gatorade and nibbles of a sandwich. In weeks, Garland transformed himself from fleshy 155-pound socialite to a monkish 125-pound scrapper. He was determined to win the NCAA title and under his spell, we had no choice but to follow.
Garland placed second that year at the NCAA tournament, upending the No. 1 seed from Iowa in the quarterfinals. When he returned from the tournament the team sat down in front of a VCR in the wrestling room and watched the tape of the upset. As the final whistle blew, Garland sprang in the air with joy and started flexing his muscles. I could make out the drone of the roaring 15,000 fans appreciative of his upset, but in the wrestling room there was nothing but wet-eyed silence. Despite his bravado, or maybe because of it, we were left to comprehend how the guy we wrestled with every day, who never wore socks and had foul-smelling shoes, had actually made it to the NCAA finals.
We plodded along for a few years after Garland left. The team sent several wrestlers to the NCAA tournament, but our runner-up finishes continued with the 2001 and 2004 seasons. We placed 16th at the NCAA tournament in 2004, bringing home a pair of All-Americans.
Author Tim Foley in 2004.
When head coach Lenny Bernstein chose to leave Virginia in 2006, U.Va. Director of Athletics Craig Littlepage summoned Garland to lead the program. He'd spent the past six years as the head assistant coach at Cornell University, where he'd coached four NCAA champions, dozens of All-Americans, and been voted the top assistant coach in the nation. Cornell had also won several conference team titles.
Garland recruited three top-10 classes in his first four seasons as the head coach and managed two runner-up finishes at the ACC tournament. Despite several indications that the program was improving, the team seemed out of the title race in 2010; Maryland was ranked No. 10 in the nation and Virginia Tech, No. 14. In three dual meets against those schools, Garland's Cavs were 0-3. The team had improved; it just so happened that Maryland and Virginia Tech had improved more.
Predictions and journalists be damned, Garland motivated his wrestlers to outperform their seeds, create upsets, and leave Raleigh with the program's first ACC championship in 33 years. For most in the wrestling world, their success was as a surprise.
The 1976-77 U.Va. wrestling team that won the ACC title 33 years ago.
I watched the award ceremony on my laptop from the Big Ten wrestling tournament in Michigan. Like many of my former teammates I was sending text messages to anyone in my address book that had ever wrestled for Virginia. As one former teammate wrote in disbelief, "We are actually alive to see this, huh?" Indeed, we were.
Coach Steve Garland at this year's ACC wrestling championships.
When the first-place team was announced, Garland's wrestlers hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him to the center of the mat. It was a proud moment to see a teammate—easily the most quixotic coach in NCAA wrestling—changing the soul of a program. Where 11 years earlier he'd held nothing but a half-eaten sandwich and a nasty pair of wrestling shoes, he was now clutching the ACC trophy high above his head, sporting black penny loafers.
Garland will tell you that it was the guys on the team who deserve the praise, and he's right, they do. But as anyone who's been in Garland's energy orbit already knows, it's his passion that sparks those wrestlers to greatness. He's an enigmatic leader with a basket full of quirks, but he's also the difference between suffering a 34th year of frustration and enjoying the opening salvo of a soon-to-blossom dynasty.
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