At Lehigh, the Little Wrestling Team That Could
By SARAH LORGE BUTLER
Published: March 1, 2005
ETHLEHEM, Pa. – Last March, Troy Letters won an N.C.A.A. wrestling
championship for Lehigh. His reward?
He went home to Shaler, a Pittsburgh suburb, where his father, Jeff, owns a
roofing company. There Letters spent his summer days stripping hot shingles
and carrying them to a Dumpster. Then he would hoist 80-pound bags of new
shingles onto his shoulders and climb a ladder back up to the roof.
“I hate it, “Letters said. “I’d rather do anything else. I’d cut hair at my
mom’s salon.”
Then again, Letters is used to heavy lifting. Last year, his defeat of
Oklahoma State’s Tyrone Lewis to win the 165-pound division in the N.C.A.A.
tournament led Lehigh to a tie for third place. It was the university’s best finish
in its history.
This season Lehigh, ranked fourth nationally, is poised to challenge for its
first team title at the national tournament.
The Mountain Hawks head to Annapolis, Md., for the Eastern Intercollegiate
Wrestling Association meet March 4-5, which will qualify individuals for the
national championships in St. Louis from March 17-19.
With his defending champion and four other all-Americans, Greg Strobel,
Lehigh’s 10th-year coach, said this squad from a small liberal arts college could
make a run against perennial favorites like Oklahoma State and Iowa State.
“People think I’m crazy for even thinking we could win it, “he said. “What
helps us is parity. With all the teams being fairly equal, then a team like
Lehigh could slide in there. If we do the right things, we could be in the
hunt. “
That kind of talk delights fans in Bethlehem, a city best known for its
deserted steel mill and its charming Christmas lights. Devoted alumni and local
fans follow the team to every road meet and pack Grace Hall, Lehigh’s home
arena. Attendance this year averaged 2,488, third highest in the country.
Matches are broadcast on local cable television, three radio stations and the
Internet.
The Lehigh Wrestling Club, a booster organization, boasts nearly 1,000
members, any one of whom will happily point out to the unindoctrinated that Lehigh
(ranked behind Oklahoma State, Iowa State and Illinois) is the only private
university among the top 14 and the top East Coast program in a sport
dominated by teams from the Big Ten and Big 12 conferences.
Dick Moll, the president of the Lehigh Wrestling Club, expects roughly 600
Lehigh supporters to make the trip to Annapolis. For constancy, surely Betty
Gerlach, 85, takes the prize. Her husband, Cy, Lehigh class of ’36, took her
to her first wrestling match in 1949; this year will be her 56th consecutive
trip to Easterns.
Undergraduates are equally smitten. When Letters got back to campus after
winning his national title last spring, he walked into one class – Engaged
Buddhism – and received a standing ovation.
Letters, 22, a two-time Pennsylvania high school state champion, chose
Lehigh after visits to other wrestling powers like Iowa State, Oklahoma and Penn
State. His decision to go to the academically intense Lehigh thrilled his
parents, neither of whom went to college. Letters, a political science major,
said he liked the way Lehigh coaches worked with athletes to improve their
natural style, rather than mold them to a team image.
Letters describes his wrestling as “funky. “
“I’ll shoot in, the guy will sprawl, and all of the sudden you’re in some
action, “he said. “It’s constant, and the fans love to see that. I do a lot of
unorthodox things. “
Strobel, who coached the United States Olympic team in 2000, recalls the
first time he saw a tape of Letters, circa 1994. “He was just a kid wrestling,
barely into puberty, if that, “Strobel said. “But this kid just had a balance,
a sense, a presence about him. And when you spot that kind of talent, it
gives you goose bumps.”
And Letters gave Strobel a solid foundation for a winning team. Strobel
first took the reins at Lehigh in 1995. The program, which dates to 1910 and has
produced 18 national champions, slipped in stature when Leigh did away with
wrestling scholarships in the early 90’s. In 1994, the team finished eighth at
the Easterns and 45th at the N.C.A.A. tournament. But some motivated alumni
responded by raising more than $4 million in less than three years. Now, the
9.9 wrestling scholarships (the most allowed by the N.C.A.A.) and the
salaries of the coach and his first assistant are backed by an endowment of more
than $7 million.
Such alumni fervor adds to the pressure on Letters. He has a chance to be
only the 11th wrestler in N.C.A.A. history – and the first since Iowa State’s
Cael Sanderson from 1998-2002 – to reach the national finals all four years.
(As a freshman, he lost to Matt Lackey of Illinois in the title bout.) He
could also be the first Lehigh wrestler since Mike Caruso in 1967 to win three
national championships.
Caruso, now the owner of a Bethlehem benefits company and a Grace Hall
regular, said: “The pressure on Troy is going to be immense at the nationals. From
the time he’s been here, the question has been, ‘Can this be the next
messiah?’ But I believe he has the kind of personality that can handle it. “
Letters’s demeanor was on display Feb. 14 when Lehigh lost to No. 1 Oklahoma
State, 24-9, in front of 5,800 fans. Lehigh moved the match to Stabler
Arena, its basketball arena, to accommodate the crowd.
Letters wrestled against Oklahoma State’s Johny Hendricks, ranked third at
165. After Letters won a close bout, 5-2, Hendricks smiled broadly.
“He said to me, ‘I’ll see you at the national finals,’ ” Letters recalled.
“I was thinking, ‘Dude, I just beat you.’ ”
Letters avoids such showboating. He relaxes with fly-fishing, and except for
a fake front left tooth, which he pops out before each bout, bears no
resemblance to the stereotype of a chest-pounding, mad-dog wrestler.
It helps that he is surrounded by equally competitive teammates, including
his roommate, Derek Zinck, at 157, who won all-American honors his freshman
year. Three others, Cory Cooperman at 141 pounds, Travis Frick at 184 and Jon
Trenge at 197, have been all-Americans. Add the sophomore Matt Ciasulli at
133, who won three Pennsylvania state titles in high school, and Strobel has his
deepest lineup heading into N.C.A.A. tournament.
“What wins the nationals is having enough manpower, enough guys placing
high, “Strobel said. “Those are six really good people that can go with about
anybody. This is as good a team as Lehigh has ever fielded. “
Despite its 21-4 record and victories against Michigan and Oklahoma, the
team knows it has a hard road ahead.
“They definitely have the horses on that team to finish very strong, ” John
Smith, the coach of two-time defending champion Oklahoma State, said. “But
nobody’s really out of sight of each other. It’s not just us and Lehigh, it’s
several other programs.”
That will not stop the faithful from rooting. Even the mayor of Bethlehem,
John B. Callahan, might make the road trip to Annapolis this year, if his wife
will let him.
“Wrestling has a very loyal core group of followers, “he said. “It’s
definitely a subset of folks, but a rather large one in the Lehigh Valley. Bethlehem
at its core is still a blue-collar town, and wrestling is a sport that
matches up very well with that mentality.”
Wrestling Gear
