Chris Ayres on Stanford wrestling in ACC: 'I literally couldn't have been happier'

Stanford wrestling head coach Chris Ayres was thrilled for the program to join the ACC ahead of the new season.

When he became head coach last season, especially late in the game in September, Stanford was in limbo with the Pac-12. Basically, they had no conference due to the initial dissolution of football and the wrestling conference was in trouble.

But as he expressed on On3 Wrestling, Ayres was thrilled his rising program could join a rising conference in the sport.

So on the uncomfortable note, so I got here, we didn’t have a conference, we were out of the Pac-12,” Ayres told On3. “We hadn’t found a place to land. So I got here, I’m like, I have no idea what’s going to happen here. And you know, you hear rumors and stuff is going on, we at the administration have been kind of going through some possibilities, but at the end of the day, when they announced the ACC, I literally couldn’t have been happier.” 

Ahead of its first year in the ACC, Stanford has numerous ranked wrestlers in the preseason and returns two All-Americans: Daniel Cardenas (157) and Hunter Garvin (165). Although, Cardenas is a candidate to redshirt this season.

Either way, a solid first year for Ayres after 17 years at Princeton. And moving forward, the travel isn’t as bad as everyone thinks!

“Everyone talks about the travel, but we were traveling east anyway,” Ayres said. “The good news about our situation with the ACC is that we travel east two times for the ACC dual meets. So it’s not a big deal, to be honest. And quite frankly, there’s two airports here. There’s three, but we use two, San Francisco, San Jose, both international-like hubs, so we generally find direct flights where we need to get to. So it’s not that bad … 

“But to be in the ACC is huge, and it’s a great conference. So to land here was an ideal situation for us, because I had no idea what was going to happen … I’ll tell you one interesting thing just about the camaraderie among you know, just the respect among coaches. When I first got on the meeting in the ACC to talk about scheduling, they said, ‘Hey, you guys should travel up three times.’ And I was like, Man, that’s going to be really difficult. We’re in quarters here too, so the quarter is only 10 weeks. So I was like, man, if we travel three times in a quarter, we’re gonna miss about three weeks of school, possibly … So what was really good was that the coaches understood that pretty quickly. They’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. Let’s do two, if Stanford comes out twice.’”