It’s been a while, but I’m back!
A few weeks ago I read Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi. I’m not an avid reader of fiction, but after some nudging from Lori, I finally picked it up and I’m certainly glad I did. Great book.
One of the characters, Simone, is a cellist preparing for his culminating recital, and Levi does an amazing job describing the moment. While reading the chapter I found myself drawing a lot of parallels to wrestling, and specifically to our guys competing at the NCAA Championships. One passage really stuck with me:
“Months of study, hundreds of hours of rehearsal, moment after moment of sometimes torturous isolation, all came down to this—the recital. In the span of a mere hour, give or take a bit, it would be over. An ocean in a thimble.”
That is the NCAA Championships.
Thousands of hours of wrestling. Early mornings. Weight cuts. Lifts. Injuries. Rehab. Film. Extra workouts. The practices where you feel great and the practices where absolutely nothing works. Years of doing something over and over again, usually with nobody watching.
Then you get three days.
Last March, we jammed a lot of ocean into that thimble.
Aden Valencia won a national title.
Nico Provo put together an epic backside run.
Tyler Knox proved a lot of doubters wrong and found his way back onto the podium.
True freshman Angelo Posada became an All-American.
Jack Consiglio, Dan Cardenas, EJ Parco, and Abe Wojcikiewicz competed their hearts out, but fell short.
Four All-Americans. A national champion. Sixth place in the country. The best NCAA finish in Stanford Wrestling history.
An ocean in a thimble.
And now the strange thing about wrestling is that almost immediately after you empty the ocean into the thimble, you walk right back into the ocean.
Our guys are back on campus. The wrestling room is full again. There are no spotlights, no podiums and no packed arenas. We are back to drilling, lifting weights, wrestling live and solving the thousand small problems that eventually determine what happens in March.
We are back to “moment after moment of sometimes torturous isolation.”
And this time, the goal is bigger.
Can Stanford Wrestling win an NCAA team trophy?
Can we finish in the top four?
Dare I say it: can we win the whole thing?
I know how ridiculous that might have sounded a few years ago. I also know we finished sixth last season, return six All-Americans, and currently sit sixth in FloWrestling’s preseason tournament rankings.
Penn State is incredible, but they are not going to win the NCAA Championship every year for the rest of time. Nobody does. Iowa won nine straight titles from 1978 through 1986, which at the time probably felt permanent. Then Iowa State won in 1987. A year later, Arizona State won the NCAA Championship without a single individual national champion.
Arizona State remains the only program west of the Rocky Mountains to win an NCAA Wrestling Championship (I took some heat in another newsletter in relation to my geographical ineptitude, but I double checked and Arizona is, in fact, west of the Rocky Mountains).
Why couldn’t the next one be Stanford?
There is another part of this “ocean in a thimble” idea that I love.
When somebody eventually hands you a trophy, the trophy itself is actually pretty small. It sits on a shelf. You can carry it around. You can take a picture with it.
That is the thimble.
But inside that trophy is an ocean.
It would contain Aden’s championship. Nico’s comeback. Tyler’s persistence. Angelo became an All-American as a freshman. Thousands of practices from wrestlers whose names may never show up in an NCAA bracket, coaches who poured years into this place, alumni who wrestled when the program had almost nothing, and supporters who refused to let Stanford Wrestling disappear when there was the attempt to drop the program in 2020.
That is the part I think about.
When we put an NCAA team trophy in our wrestling room, it won’t just represent the ten guys who wrestled that weekend.
It will contain the history of Stanford Wrestling.
An ocean in a thimble.
October = Stanford Wrestling Kickoff
Which brings us to October.
For those who are newer to our ecosystem, October has become the month when Stanford Wrestling comes back to life, not just inside the wrestling room, but throughout our entire community.
We’ll host our annual State of the Program Zoom, where we pull back the curtain a little bit and talk about where the program stands, what we are trying to build and what lies ahead. It’s tonight, September 30, 5:00pm PT/8:00pm ET. If you’re an alum who didn’t get the email or a fan who I know (can’t have the enemy getting a peak at what we have planned) who would like to check out the meeting, shoot me a message and hopefully I can get you the link (I’m currently drowning in the aforementioned ocean).
We’ll also bring back our alumni Happy Hours, with different generations of Stanford wrestlers getting together virtually. These have become one of my favorite things we do. I hear stories that I probably shouldn’t repeat, occasionally learn which alumni are still carrying grudges from wrestle-offs that happened 35 years ago, and almost always learn something about the history of this program that I didn’t know before.
The lineup: (All times are 5:00pm PT/8:00pm ET)
graduated 1979 and before: Monday, 10/5/26
1980-1989: Tuesday, 10/6/26
1990-1999: Wednesday, 10/7/26
2000-2009: Thursday, 10/8/26
2010-2026: Tuesday, 10/13/26.
The deeper I get into this job, the more I appreciate how much Stanford Wrestling existed long before any of us currently here arrived and how important it is that the current team understands that.
Reunion Homecoming is October 15–18 this year, and we will again use the weekend as an opportunity to bring our wrestling family together on campus.
Tailgate 11:30, Intersquad Match (In FanFest) 1:30, Football vs Elon 4:30
October is also Match Month for the California RTC, so be on the lookout for information on this.
October is really our bridge between the quiet work of the offseason and the start of competition.
Then November hits.
And this year, November is going to be fun.
Season Tickets + An Incredible Home Slate
Last season was the first year we ticketed our home duals, and I thought it was a huge step forward. We averaged 1,033 fans per dual, which placed Stanford 24th nationally among Division I wrestling programs.
That was good.
I think we can blow that number away this season.
Our home schedule gives us every opportunity to do it.
We start November 15 with something completely different: an outdoor dual against Wyoming in the softball stadium.
I love this event.
The idea is to make it more than just a Stanford dual. We want it to feel like the kickoff of wrestling season for the entire Bay Area wrestling community. Wyoming is currently ranked No. 11 in FloWrestling’s tournament rankings, so it also happens to be a pretty important wrestling match. This will be our youth and high school promotion, and teams bringing 15 or more athletes will get a deep discount.
The softball stadium only has 1,347 seats, so I fully expect those seats to fill. Fortunately, there is a lot of standing-room space around the venue.
One week later, things get even bigger.
November 22: Oklahoma State comes to Maples Pavilion.
Oklahoma State is currently ranked No. 2 in the country.
I’ll get into the individual matchups as we get closer, but there could be fireworks all over the lineup.
I am also putting a completely unresearched goal out into the universe: the largest attended college wrestling dual in California history.
I have done absolutely no research to determine what that number actually is, so this is currently more of a marketing strategy than a historically informed statement.
But I know this: Maples packed with wrestling fans for Stanford vs. Oklahoma State would be an incredible environment.
Then we get another major opportunity on January 8 against Virginia Tech, currently ranked No. 5 nationally.
There is an interesting wrinkle with this one. The dual is currently scheduled for Ford-Burnham. However, if we are projecting at least 2,000 tickets sold six weeks before the dual, we will move it to Maples.
I actually love that.
Essentially Stanford is saying: show us the demand.
So let’s show them.
If the wrestling community wants more big-time college wrestling events in the Bay Area, this is how we prove it.
We finish the home schedule against North Carolina on January 22 and Virginia on February 12.
As of today, our home opponents include teams ranked No. 2, No. 5, No. 11 and No. 16 nationally.
That is a pretty ridiculous home schedule.
Season tickets are available here:
https://tickets.gostanford.com/section/wrestling-eta9
Buy them. Use them. Give them to someone if you can’t go. Drag your kids, your wrestling team, your neighbors or the person sitting next to you at work who still thinks professional wrestling and college wrestling are the same thing. Do it now before you get busy and forget!
We want Maples, and the Bay Area, to feel different this season.
October=Momentum
Last year we were talking about trying to build a program capable of competing with the best programs in the country.
Well, now we know we can.
We just finished sixth in the country.
We had four All-Americans.
We had a national champion.
And now we return a team that, at least on paper, has a legitimate opportunity to do something Stanford Wrestling has never done before.
That changes the question.
The question is no longer, Can Stanford become nationally relevant?
The question is, Can we sustain it?
Can we provide the infrastructure around these athletes that allows them to continue developing? Can we retain great wrestlers? Can we attract great wrestlers? Can we build the olympic wrestling movement, the staffing, the resources and the community necessary to compete with programs that have been investing at this level for decades?
I’ve said this before: we are not going to win by simply trying to become a slightly smaller version of Penn State, Iowa or Oklahoma State.
We have to build this differently.
Our advantage has to be community.
California wrestling. Stanford Wrestling alumni. Families. Fans. Donors. Youth wrestlers. Clubs. High schools. Olympians. People who believe there should be a nationally dominant college wrestling program on the West Coast.
That ecosystem is becoming real.
But if we want this run to last, the infrastructure around the program has to grow along with the success on the mat.
We’ve raised the standard.
Now the support has to rise with it.
So Here We Are
October is here.
The guys are back in the room. The calendar is starting to fill. Alumni will be coming back to campus. Tickets are going on sale.
And somewhere inside Arrillaga, a group of wrestlers is starting to fill another ocean.
Most of what happens over the next five months will never be seen.
That is the point.
Eventually March will come. The arena will fill. The lights will turn on. Ten guys will walk onto the mat carrying thousands of hours of work and, hopefully, the history and expectations of an entire community with them.
Then we will get another thimble.
Let’s see how much ocean we can fit into it.
See you in October.
— Coach Ayres
Matt Gentry Head Coach of Wrestling
