HITCHINGS: Rutgers wrestling success emboldens all of U., athletic department’s future
Saturday evening in Pittsburgh, one of the most notable events in Rutgers Athletics history took place as wrestlers Nick Suriano and Anthony Ashnault both stood atop their respective weight classes as the best in the NCAA. The wins are the first in wrestling for the school but have a much larger impact on the program than just two trophies in a case.
Over the last 12 years, head coach Scott Goodale has built the Rutgers Wrestling program quite literally from the bottom up. He often recalls in interviews his first home dual meet at Rutgers back in 2008, a 42-0 win over Wagner at the College Avenue Gymnasium, attended by less than 100 people. He describes how the scene was so dismal, he had to leave to grab a portable clock from his car after the one in the gym broke down.
Now, in a training room that hangs a banner proclaiming “Rutgers Wants NCAA Champions,” they have two. Suriano, a junior from Paramus who transferred from wrestling giant and Big Ten rival Penn State, and Ashnault, a graduate student from South Plainfield who is Rutgers’ all-time leader in wins. The two are quintessentially Jersey. Suriano is often seen in flashy clothes, or on Instagram dancing to club music. Ashnault stays taunting opposing coaches and living and dying by his "Shnaulty be mobbin'" attitude. Together they are now cemented in history as Rutgers athletic legends.
The wins are the first individual national championships won by a Rutgers athlete since a fencing gold for Alexis Jemal back in 2003. The school discontinued their fencing program in 2007. The wrestling program was almost cut before Goodale was hired. His persistence to bring the energy to New Jersey wrestling is so well known that it kept the program alive. It is what fills the seats of the Rutgers Athletic Center to capacity, it is what brought home two national champions and it is what has set up the wrestling program and athletics as a whole, allowing it to change the culture around the Scarlet Knights. Winning is no longer a pipe dream.
On Tuesday, Ashnault, Suriano and Goodale received an honor reserved for a champion as they rang the nearly 200-year-old bell at Old Queens. This was the first time the bell was rung for athletic accomplishment since the women’s basketball team’s Women's National Invitation Tournament Championship in 2014. The wrestling trio donned work gloves to protect their hands from the elderly ropes, but as they are celebrated at one of campus’s oldest buildings, its newest one is nearly finished being built.
The RWJBarnabas Health Athletic Performance Center, will provide, among other services, training facilities for Rutgers basketball, gymnastics and wrestling teams. The multimillion-dollar facility is steps from the Rutgers Athletic Center (RAC), where each of these teams play their home games. It is projected to open in July 2019, placing Rutgers among the nation’s top training facilities. The wrestling team currently practices in the basement of the College Avenue Gymnasium — the decades-old building with not much more than a room of wrestling mats and some cardio training equipment.
This new facility breathes a breath of fresh air into the lungs of four of Rutgers most successful programs. Women’s basketball just made the NCAA tournament, and led the Big Ten for most of the regular season. Men’s basketball had a historic year, smashing previous conference records. Gymnastics upset Penn State at the RAC in February, and wrestling now has two national champions. That success, aligned with a new state-of-the-art facility opening this summer, has recruits buzzing to come play at Rutgers for the first time in more than a decade.
Scarlet Knight coaches have long tried to figure out how to keep top recruits from New Jersey high schools to stay in state. The addition to the Big Ten did not help that struggle, as names like now NFL star Saquon Barkley committed to, and then left Rutgers for bigger and better athletic programs.
With this new-found success, certain sports have begun to crack that code. Next year the men’s basketball team will add Paul Mulcahy, one of the state’s best, from Gill St. Bernard's School in Gladstone, New Jersey. Wrestling will add to its fully stacked roster of Jersey names as top-ranked recruit JoJo Aragona joins the program.
For the first time since the mid-2000s football explosion, the mood around Rutgers Athletics is overwhelmingly positive for the near future. Rutgers has not hoisted an NCAA Team Championship since a 1949 fencing win. Do not be surprised if that changes in the next few years.
T.J. Hitchings is a School of Arts and Sciences senior majoring in journalism and media studies, with a concentration in sports media. His column, “From the Nosebleeds,” runs on alternate Thursdays.
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