By MATT TROWBRIDGE, Rockford Register Star
The alarm would ring. Time to get up. A new day.
Each time, Grant Miller would have the same thought: Please, let this day be over. Soon.
“I find myself just hating life every day,” said the one-time No. 1 heavyweight wrestling recruit in the nation. “Every day when I woke up in the morning, I couldn’t wait until the day is over. That’s how I felt all the way through the winter quarter.”
So the former two-time state champ from Rockton Hononegah walked away. He left Ohio State. And he left Division I wrestling.
Just like all of the state champs before him.
NIC-9 wrestlers have won 13 state championships since 1993. But none of those state champs has ever wrestled in an NCAA Division I Tournament. Or even made varsity as a senior.
“That’s sad,” Machesney Park Harlem coach Tom Draheim said. “My goal when I got here was to get kids to the next level. It hasn’t happened around here at all.”
The talent is there. The reward isn’t.
Division I college wrestling may be the toughest grind in all of sports. It demands total dedication and offers virtually no recognition.
“You learn not to love the sport,” said Miller, who transferred to Dominican University and will enroll at St. Xavier next year to play NAIA football. “They treat the sport like a gauntlet.”
Few survive that gauntlet. Northern Illinois University 133-pounder Sam Hiatt, a former state champ from DeKalb, is the only wrestler from the five-county area who competed in this past weekend’s NCAA tournament in St. Louis.
Some quit school and never go back. Like Belvidere’s Nick Cina, who started the state championship run in 1993 and quickly left Wyoming. Others move down to a less intense level, like Belvidere assistant coach Rob Anderson.
The 1995 state champ at 125 pounds surprised himself by cracking Illinois’ lineup at 126 as a true freshman.
“I didn’t even expect to go D-1,” Anderson said.
But he transferred to a junior college after one year, then moved on to Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he was a Division III runner-up as a senior.
“Working so hard and cutting weight takes a lot out of the body, and mentally, too,” Anderson said. “I would have loved to stay at Illinois, but cutting weight caught up to me. When I got done with the season, I quit going to class. I ballooned up to 160 and just sat around and ate.
“I was mentally broke.”
Five months of college wrestling broke him. Five months of waking up at 5 a.m., sitting in a sauna for an hour, going to school, then practice at 3:30.
“Then I’d go home, nibble on something, and go sit in the sauna again or work out,” Anderson said. “That was my routine for the whole season.”
The routine doesn’t end when the season ends. Or begin when the season begins.
“Wrestling season,” Miller said, “starts when you get to campus. And you work all the way through the end of April. It’s not like the workouts change.”
Sure they do. Sort of.
During the season, Miller practiced six days a week at 11 a.m. at Ohio State. He lifted weights two days a week at 6:30. On the other three weekdays, he ran at 6:30 a.m., sprinting 200 yards 18 times and running 30 laps on a 1/8th-mile indoor track, sprinting the straightaways and jogging the curves.
In the offseason, practices dropped to four days a week with five days of weight lifting.
“Your reward is you don’t have to run,” Miller said. “But it’s not like the season is ever over.”
In high school, wrestling is fun. In college, it’s a job.
“A job I didn’t like,” Miller said.
It’s a job that, at times, no one likes. Mike Mena, a four-time state champ from Sterling Newman with a career 157-0-1 record in high school, spoke openly last summer about how much he looked forward to quitting wrestling after this year’s Olympic Trials. “It’s really too much,” he said of cutting weight for 15 years and taking a physical pounding.
When Mena was an All-American at Iowa, he told Hononegah coach Marty Kaiser: “We’re not the best wrestlers, but we’re the ones who have stuck it out.”
Many don’t. Brad Lynde, Miller and Russell Vanderheyden, who finished fifth at state twice, all received Division I college scholarships under Kaiser. Only Vanderheyden lasted more than a year. He reached the NCAAs as a sophomore, but was beaten out as a senior this year on a powerhouse Central Michigan team that claimed eight of the 10 individual champions in the Mid-American Conference.
“College wrestling is unbelievably harder,” said Kaiser, who wrestled one year at Division III before retiring with a shoulder injury. “It’s a whole ‘nother world.
“And there’s so many variables in college. That’s the first time those kids see freedom. If they don’t manage their time, it can all come crashing down on them.
“For Russell to go through all he’s done and not get the rewards and still stick it out, that’s unbelievable. He’s a true man.”
Who loves his sport. And lives it.
That’s the only way to survive in Division I.
“There’s no doubt wrestling is the hardest sport in intercollegiate athletics,” NIU coach Dave Grant said. “They have to cut weight, run stairs and lift weights. And they have to go out on the mat by themselves and win or lose by themselves. You can’t pass the ball. There’s no tag-teaming.”
And no glory.
Wrestling “lost its luster” for Miller after he won his first state title as a sophomore. “It went from winning was fun to winning was mandatory,” he said. “I figured in college, I might be able to gain it back.”
Instead, he learned high school was the pinnacle of wrestling popularity.
“The whole community was behind you in high school,” Miller said. “They’d see you in the paper and be proud to be behind you. The entire NIC-9 would be behind you at the state tournament. That was cool.
“In college, there is no community. No one knows you are a wrestler. They don’t even know who you are.
“In college, everything is a grind and there is no reward. At Ohio State, wrestling is the second-to-last sport that makes money. And they treated it like that: The second-to-worst sport, that’s how they treated you.”
At its best, college wrestling news makes a modest splash. Illinois made the front page of the Champaign News-Gazette when it won its first Big Ten title in 52 years.
“But there was more stuff on the basketball team losing one game,” said Cal Ferry, a three-time state champ from Harlem. “We had a little headline on the bottom of the sports section. They had the front page. And the rest of the front page of sports.”
The lack of publicity, though, never bothered Ferry.
“I actually kind of like it,” he said. “I like when people cheer for you, but I never needed or wanted the attention.”
Ferry is the most notable of the NIC-9’s missing college wrestlers. The greatest of all in high school, he went 16-16 for Illinois at 141 pounds as a redshirt freshman. But he hasn’t cracked the lineup the past two years. “I was certified at 141, but I wasn’t going to make it,” he said. Instead, Ferry has filled in on occasion at 149, 157 and 165.
“I expected him to be an All-American,” Belvidere’s Anderson said.
Instead, Ferry doesn’t plan on ever making varsity again. He’ll graduate next December with a degree in kinesiology.
“I’m for sure practicing until I graduate, but I don’t plan on challenging for a spot,” Ferry said.
“It’s a good sport,” Ferry added. “You will learn a lot about who you are. It’s tough; you get to see how you feel when things aren’t going your way.
“But you get interested in other things. People want to move on.”
The only ones who stay are the ones who love the sport so much they can’t let go. Or feel they have something left to prove.
Harlem’s Chad Vandiver, 21-9 as NIU’s redshirt freshman 125-pounder this year, was the only former NIC-9 wrestler to participate in a Division I conference tournament this year. He was driven by the fact he never even placed at state in high school. Vandiver and former Harlem teammate Brandon Lozdoski, a state runner-up who red-shirted this year at Northwestern, will carry the NIC-9 flag in college next year. And maybe former Rockford East heavyweight Joel Powers, who walked away from his scholarship at Indiana last year but now talks of a comeback at NIU.
But there won’t be many. And all will face the challenge of their life.
“You have to have a burning desire to wrestle,” NIU’s Grant said. “Some wrestlers go to college for money because they get a scholarship. That’s not a good reason. There are easier ways to make money.
“You have to diet constantly. You have to live your life where wrestling is No. 1 all the time. Because if you don’t make the sacrifices, you are going to get beat on. And that makes people quit.
“Only the strong survive in this sport.”
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