Behind Enemy Lines: Cornell wrestling coach Rob Koll

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Rob Koll, a former NCAA champion wrestler for UNC, has taken Cornell wrestling to elite status in his 20 year tenure heading up the Big Red wrestling program. During his time in Ithaca, Cornell has won 14 Ivy League titles and crowned 11 national champions. Koll’s team’s have won 60 consecutive Ivy League duals. We sat down with Koll to discuss his budding stars, season highlights, and the Penn-Princeton rivalry.

Rob Koll: We have a very young team. Honestly, my expectations at the beginning of the season weren’t as high as they usually are. Four freshmen we have starting, and there is a lack of senior leadership. But they’re not difficult. They’ve matured much quicker than I expected actually – it’s amazing how quickly these guys have come along. All four of them are in the national top 20. It’s great for this year, but what I’m really excited about is going forward in the next couple years.

DP: Your team is undefeated thus far this season. In your mind, what has been the team’s most impressive victory?

RK: To be fair, we haven’t had the most demanding dueling schedule up to this point. Illinois was a nice win. Lehigh also. At Lehigh, we wrestled extremely well – it was a really nice win. Those were two really good wins. At the end of the year we obviously always have Penn because that’s just a great rivalry, and then we have the National Duals, which are the following weekend. So Penn, National Duals. We always put a little exclamation point on Penn, because in the last 20 years or so, the Ivy League title has always been Cornell or Penn. We’ve been successful the last couple years, but going down to the Palestra is always intense. DP: Are there any particular moments or matches that stand out to you from the Cornell vs. Penn rivalry in your tenure?

RK: I remember, I think it was 2008, was an amazing year. It was at the Palestra. We had two starters out, but we were still kind of cocky, and thought we’d be okay. Penn should have beaten us. There was no way we should have won the dual. It was the second to last match.  Rollie Peterkin was wrestling for Penn, and he was a captain, and he was ranked eighth. We had a young man, first year varsity, Mike Rodriguez. He was a good wrestler, but he was one of our weaker wrestlers. And we thought, “Oh good lord, it’s over.” Our heavyweight broke his elbow and had to forfeit. We had another wrestler who got taken down at the buzzer. Everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong.

Then, lo and behold, the Penn kid throws himself to his back trying to pin our guy. He got down by five, and it just got worse from that moment on. And we ended up majoring him. Then, of course, he came back and beat us at the EIWAs, but it didn’t matter. But 12-15 years back, Penn seemed to always find ways to beat us. Over the last 11 years, we’ve been able to turn the tables and find ways to win. A lot of times, the better teams just tend to find ways to win. We’ve been fortunate to have a little more talent in the last couple of years. Hopefully it’ll be the same this year.

RK: Nahshon is a great story. He started wrestling in about 10th grade, so we don’t know his top end. I expect him to be an Olympian, I really do believe he’s that good. At this level, you have to have a great deal of athleticism, desire, talent, and all those other things, but being a great athlete is number one on the list. And so for someone like that, who only started wrestling in 10th grade, where everyone else has wrestled since they were five years old, who knows how much better he can get. But yeah, Nahshon’s been doing great.

The other one is (second-ranked 184-pound freshman) Gabe Dean. He’s ranked 2nd or 3rd in the country right now. He’s just really turned it on. I know he has wrestled Lorenzo Thomas many times over the last year. Dean was greyshirting last year, he was taking classes part time. He was wrestling unattached in tournaments. I know that Thomas got the better of him last year more often than not, and I’m sure he doesn’t intend to let that to happen this time. But it should be a great match, it should definitely be a lot of fun.

DP: Saturday is a big day for your team, which is set to wrestle an Ivy League doubleheader. Can you talk about the magnitude of those two conference duals?

RK: Historically, we’ve wrestled Penn and Princeton on the same day because Princeton was so weak, and the reason they were so weak was they dropped the program. And now, the coach has done a phenomenal job of building it up, and so I don’t know if that’s such a great idea, because Penn’s always got a really strong team, and to have to wrestle another real strong team is kind of like playing Russian Roulette. The advantage of it is that the Ivy League doesn’t give us many dates, whereas in the Big Ten, you have 16 dates you are allowed to compete on, and we only get 12. So that’s the reason we do that – it’s a necessity, it’s not that I want to wrestle them on the same day, it’s that I have to, so that we can have more home duals and try to build a following up here at Cornell.

It’s a great deal of risk to wrestle a team like Penn – I know they’ve struggled a bit this year, but they still have the capability of being really good. And when you’re wrestling a tough team, the likelihood of injury is significantly higher. So now you’re traveling twice in one day, and you’re wrestling a tough team before you wrestle another tough team, so you have the risk of injury. So it’s a little scary, but it also prepares you for the tournaments. At the end of the day, we’re trying to prepare for the national championship, so we try to put these guys under adversity as much as possible. Ideally, adversity, but victorious. I don’t want to prepare these guys so well for the nationals that we lose the Ivies, because that is very important to our alumni and coaches, as well as to our wrestlers obviously.