Cornell Wrestling in the NYTimes

The New York Times yesterday had a nice front page spread on its sports section about the unexpected rise of Cornell's wrestling program over the last several years.

The Big Red are atop the national preseason poll for the first time ever in a sport that is so heavily dominated by midwestern schools. As the Times points out, only four of the last 8 NCAA championships have come from schools outside of the states Iowa, Minnesota, and Oklahoma. Not only is it surprising for an eastern school to be at the top of the nation — it's an Ivy League school.

And the article turns, as many on Ivy-League-schools-in a-national-context often do, to how the program builds such success without athletic scholarships.

“I’ve been saying for years, ‘Why not us?’ ” Cornell Coach Rob Koll said. “I’ve always believed a national championship was possible.”
When Koll took over the Cornell program 17 years ago, he frequently said the same thing to his coaching peers.

“They would laugh at me,” Koll said after a practice last week. “Everyone told me that it can’t be done at Cornell. They said: ‘It’s too expensive, you have no scholarships, you won’t get recruits in, and if you do, the academics there will wear them out.’

“I heard it everywhere. I just didn’t listen.”

another, about the schools incredible Friedman Wrestling Arena

When I sat down with Athletic Director Steve Bilsky at the beginning of the semester, we talked briefly about how Penn distributes its resources athletically.

"We’re trying to be broad based," he said. "We don’t select half a dozen or 10 sports and say ‘we’re going to put all our marbles there’, like some schools in the league do. And they probably are right in doing that, but we don’t. We try to be as good as we can to everybody."

And while Cornell's wrestling renaissance may have been bolstered in 2002 by the arena, Penn's may be beginning right now. With the newly completed Weiss Pavilion, athletes can train on a whole new level, and recruits are surely wowed by the facilities. Penn Park is slated for completion next year, bringing even more to the table.

But if Penn proves one thing, it's that sometimes the flashiness of a brand new facility is nothing compared to the magic of the Palestra, which opened its doors in 1927.