Takedown Report

Meet the 20-year-old whiz who’s helping Duke revolutionize college wrestling’s numbers game

College wrestling’s most valuable under-the-radar asset is a soon-to-be junior whose last match was in high school.  Charlie Gelman is a smart-as-a-whip 20-year-old Illinois native who’s double majoring in statistical science and computer science and minoring in electrical and computer engineering at Duke. He’s a millionaire in the making, according to Duke wrestling coach Glen Lanham, who brought Gelman on board a couple years ago and named him the program’s advanced statistics analyst.  “They let me pick my own title,” Gelman confessed a couple weeks ago. “I made it look better.” 

The truth is, Gelman has helped improve the looks of Duke wrestling during his two years with the program.  The former high school wrestler created a program that helps the Blue Devils track high-level statistics and funnel them into an easy-to-consume format that can sort by setups, shot types, finishes, bottom-position techniques, top-position turns and other match sequences and scenarios. This gives Lanham and his staff hard data to cut out the guesswork associated with where practice time should be focused.  

“It changed the way we looked at practice time,” Lanham said. “It gives you an outline of what we need to work on to be successful instead of guessing. When I’ve got a guy for an individual (workout), I know exactly what we need to do to make him better. It’s definitely a game changer for us.”  Rest of the story at https://www.trackwrestling.com/tw/PortalPost.jsp?postId=1668504132

June 26, 2019 - Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized