Takedown Report

Popolizio and the Pack

How a coaching change and the creation of #PackMentality took NC State to new heights and gave Raleigh wrestling fever.

If a casual sports fan had wandered into William Neal Reynolds Coliseum on the campus of North Carolina State last Friday, they would have been greeted by the crowd of more than 4300 fans who were there to watch the dual meet between #3 NC State and their bitter rival, #8 UNC. They would have walked into a wall of sound coming from the Wolfpack fans and laid their eyes on a sea of red that filled seemingly every nook and cranny of the arena. The environment was exactly what you would expect in a high stakes rivalry sporting event and, if one knew nothing of wrestling or the history of NC State’s program, they would have thought that the Wolfpack was a perennial power and that crowds like this were fairly normal for wrestling matches. What they wouldn’t know is that less than a decade ago, attendance was scarce and wins were rare. They wouldn’t know that just eight years ago, the Wolfpack finished dead last in the ACC and scored a half point at the NCAA Tournament – and that half point was cause for celebration! What a casual sports fan wouldn’t know or ever assume by witnessing the record setting crowd in Reynolds Coliseum last Friday is how far the NC State Wrestling program has come in the last eight years, a turnaround that started with Debbie Yow’s decision to hire a man that would come to be known as “Skip.”
Part 1: The Skip
March of 2012 was a good month for Pat Popolizio. The Niskayuna, New York native was wrapping up his sixth year as the head coach at Binghamton University and had just led the Bearcats to a 14th place finish at the NCAA Tournament a mere five years after going winless in dual meets in 2006-07. Donnie Vinson and Nick Gwiazdowski had both earned All American honors in 2012 and had at least one year of eligibility left and both looked to be legitimate national title contenders in the very near future. It was starting to look like Binghamton could make a real run at cracking the top ten and putting multiple wrestlers in the national finals, a monumental feat for a program that had been reinstated less than a decade prior. Popolizio finally had things rolling at Binghamton and was excited to see what would come next, but little did he know that he would find himself trading Binghamton green for NC State red just a few weeks later. …. story at http://www.hmawrestling.com/article/popolizio-and-the-pack/?mc_cid=a84c1748d7&mc_eid=2ef7cbca4b

March 15, 2020 - Posted by The TakeDown Report | Uncategorized