Cornell wrestling stays motivated despite lost season

The sport of wrestling, expectedly, has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. While there have been smaller competitions, USA Wrestling decided to not participate in the upcoming World Wrestling Championships next month. Just last week, the Ivy League canceled all winter sports, ending the season for several of the top teams in the nation including Cornell University’s second-ranked wrestling squad.

With no competition on the horizon, the Big Red continue to train and improve as they begin the long wait to next season. Cornell associate head coach Mike Grey discussed how the athletes and coaches have handled the past few days.

“Our guys, true to character, have been staying strong and have been really helping each other more than anything and being there for each other along with the staff,” Grey said. “If anything, this just is going to bring us even closer together. So, that’s kind of where we’re at. It’s been a tough couple of days, but the guys are really leaning on each other and just trying to do the best they can in the sense of continuing to work and continuing to do the things we can do, which is lift and conditioning.”

Coaching philosophy across Cornell will be tested without competition. For Grey, it’s all about having his athletes as ready as possible for the 2021 season and putting the work in now for a later payoff.

“I’m just a big believer that hard work never goes by the wayside,” Grey said. “It’s going to come back to you, whether it be in your athletic pursuit or in your professional pursuit or just in life down the road. Hard work always comes back. It teaches you great things and molds you into the person you want to be.”

Motivation could be an issue for some teams as a few collegiate conferences have canceled competition for the winter thus far. Cornell wrestling is not one of those teams, and according to Grey, that comes down to the athletes themselves.

“A lot of it has to do with who these kids are as individuals, as highly motivated individuals,” he said. “Obviously, we need to come up with ways to continue to train and motivate the guys, but I think, ultimately, they’re going to do it themselves. They’re going to realize that they still want to be national champions, and they still want to be All-Americans and do everything they came to Cornell to do. They still want to do that.”

Grey added that he hopes to find competitions for the team after the school year comes to a close so Olympic-hopefuls Yianni Diakomihalis and Vito Arujau are not the only ones on the team wrestling at a high level.

Athletic eligibility was addressed by the Ivy League in its cancellation statement, explaining that student-athletes will not lose a season of eligibility. However, they’ll have to work with their institution to push back their graduation if they’d like to make up for this lost year down the road.

“There’s going to be a lot of leave-of-absences next semester,” Grey said. “A lot of student-athletes are going to take the semester off next semester and hope to be able to extend their graduation for another year so that they can get this year back. It’s something that they’re going to need to work with our compliance office and really just find some new passions along the way, in regards to academics and trying to find maybe a second major or something along those lines.”

Grey speculated that one possible solution for the Ivy League would be to allow graduate students to compete in athletics, citing a specific example of a student-athlete who could take advantage of that.

“It’d be really cool if maybe for the next couple years, the Ivy League allows graduate students to compete,” Grey said. “A guy like Hunter Richard on our squad is a senior this year. Last year, he took second in the conference tournament and qualified for his first NCAA tournament, and that got taken away from him. Then, this season gets taken away from him as well. For a guy like that, I would love to see him get a year while being a graduate student so he can compete for Cornell one more time.”

For now, there was plenty of hype surrounding the Big Red heading into this season with hopes that it could be the first team in program history to win the NCAA Championship. That pursuit will have to wait until next year.

“Ultimately, for our guys, the goal doesn’t change,” Grey said. “Maybe there’s a chip on the shoulder, but more than anything, it’s just this focus and this drive to be as great as they can be. This drive to get what they worked for. Ultimately, that is what this team is going to personify next year: hard work and a commitment to excellence, and then also a drive to see how well they can do.”

While the team will lose out on what would have likely been a great year, the championship aspirations for the Big Red will still be present when they hit the mats in 2021.