How Pat Popolizio built NC State wrestling into a powerhouse, Part I

This past weekend, NC State wrestling had its biggest home weekend in years, a unique ACC double-header featuring No. 22 North Carolina Friday night and No. 7 Virginia Tech Sunday evening, both at Reynolds Coliseum and broadcast nationally on ACC Network.

The Wolfpack is currently ranked fourth nationally and has resided among the nation’s top 10 for 98 consecutive polls, not leaving since entering in late 2015, after an improbable 19-15 win at wrestling superpower Oklahoma State, just the 45th home loss (against 547 wins) in Cowboys history at the time.

When NC State entered the top 10 for the first time under head coach Pat Popolizio, who is now in his 10th year at the helm in Raleigh, it was a place the Wolfpack had not been since 1993.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the coach completely tore down the once-proud program that had fallen on hard times. And it’s not debatable to say he’s rebuilt it stronger than ever before.

Every jaw-dropping structure needs a stable foundation. This is the inside story of exactly how Popolizio was able to build just that — and so much more — from those that were there.

‘Nothing changes if nothing changes’

For a long time, head wrestling coach Pat Popolizio’s office used to have a sign hanging behind his desk with a simple motto: “Nothing changes if nothing changes.”

The sign has been moved to an office inside the wrestling room down the hall to make room for memorabilia and photos from his time at NC State. There’s been plenty to commemorate from the coach’s first nine years — three national champions, 21 All-Americans, four ACC team championships and three regular-season conference crowns.

The first team trophy for a top-four finish at the NCAA Championships in school history — just the second ever in the sport by an ACC squad — overlooks Popolizio every day when he sits at his desk.  

Though that motto may not physically reside inside the office anymore, it has made everything commemorated within its walls possible.

GET ONE YEAR OF THE WOLFPACKER FOR $1!

When Popolizio took over the NC State wrestling program prior to the 2012-13 campaign, it had not finished with a winning record in five straight seasons. The Wolfpack had won three ACC matches in the last four years and had a highest finish of 44th nationally in the last three NCAA Championships.

After 10 top-17 national finishes in a 14-year span from 1980-93 under legendary head coach Bob Guzzo, the team had not reached those heights since. So director of athletics Debbie Yow was fine if everything changed under Popolizio.

In fact, that’s what she hired him to do.

“We weren’t doing very well competitively, and we had some issues off the mat,” Yow recalled this fall. “So I wanted a disciplinarian. I wanted consistent discipline. I wanted it to be understood from day one what was expected by the student-athletes.”

A coach from ‘some place called Binghamton’

The wrestling world knew who Popolizio was in 2012.

The 34-year-old had just completed his sixth season at Binghamton in upstate New York. He led a program that had around four of a possible 9.9 scholarships to a 14th-place finish at the NCAA Championships.

It was quite a climb for the Bearcats, who went 0-12 the year prior to his hiring.

And they didn’t just excel on the mat. From 2006-11, the team’s Academic Performance Rate (APR) went from 727 to 957. In his final year, 12 wrestlers earned All-Academic honors. The squad was also known for its community service.

The former New York high school state champion and three-time NCAA qualifier at Oklahoma State who had helped the Cowboys to four top-five NCAA finishes in his career was exactly what Yow was seeking.

Even if she didn’t know it.

When looking for a wrestling coach, Yow had instructed her staff to look at the top 25 rankings and find “somebody that doesn’t belong.” Upon being presented a coach from “some place called Binghamton,” and her staff guessing at its location, she told them: “Call the guy. I want to know who he is even if I can’t pronounce his last name. Just call him and get a read on the situation.”

Popolizio didn’t even apply for the job. NC State cold-called him.

Culture shock

The Wolfpack gig intrigued the sport’s rising star — despite a negative first-hand experience with the program not too long before NC State called. Popolizio remembers being at a tournament while coaching Binghamton, and his team sat near the Wolfpack squad in the bleachers.

“Just the stuff they were talking about and how loud they were — it was like, what are these guys doing?” he remembered roughly a decade later. “Then, you fast forward how many months later, I end up coaching that team. It’s crazy that it played out like that.”

His perception of NC State wrestling at the time wasn’t that much different from the national reputation: “This was a place where a lot of good kids came and you never really heard from them anymore.”

The team did not know Popolizio any more than Yow, not to mention the unsettling emotions that come with any coaching change.

“They fired the guy that brought me here; that’s my guy by default,” Tommy Gantt, an eventual All-American who had just finished his freshman season, remembered. “This new guy, I don’t really know who he is or what he’s about — or for that matter where Binghamton University is.”

• NC STATE FOOTBALL RECRUITING: 23 to watch in 2023

Gantt remembers the first team meeting. He was already thinking about transferring, and the first impression did not make him want to rethink that.

“The first conversation didn’t go too well,” Gantt explained. “He addressed our whole team and was saying, ‘I’ve got a zero-tolerance policy, but everybody’s got a clean slate now,’ all that good stuff.

“… It was a complete culture shock. There were a lot of talks going on in the dorm that night after that first conversation. They were like, ‘Screw Pat,’ this and that. I don’t think they took well to it, because a lot of those guys were off the team within a week, maybe some within days.”

Popolizio admits now there was “no question in my mind” that type of roster turnover was required, for the sake of the program and its culture.

“We made it very clear what we were looking for, and it was just like, ‘Who is going to buy in?’” he recalled. “Tommy reminds me of this — I talked to the team for the first time and told them the things we were looking for. Tommy [later] told me, ‘Every one of those guys was laughing at you.’

“And, you know, that night they threw a hell of a party.”

Humble beginnings

Popolizio had successfully rebuilt the Binghamton program, with significantly less resources, so he knew what he had to do.

That didn’t make it any easier.

Heavyweight Nick Gwiazdowski was an All-American at Binghamton as a true freshman under Popolizio, then followed his coach to Raleigh. He did not have a rosy first impression of his new home. Or teammates.

“I don’t think any of them were bad guys, but I just don’t think they fit Pat’s vision for the program,” the two-time NCAA champion explained 10 years later. “Those were guys that fit that program at the time … and now it was new coaches, and now the expectations were different.

“I knew what Pat wanted and what he was about. There was some collision of thoughts.”

Gwiazdowski admits that his first year in Raleigh — after finishing eighth in the country individually and being on a team that finished among the top 15 — was “one of my harder years of wrestling.” He was redshirting and therefore focused solely on training.

And the team trained hard with Popolizio focused on setting the culture and expectations moreso than final scores of matches.

“There were a lot of workouts. A lot of restarting drills. A lot of yelling. It was not easy,” Gwiazdowski said. “Pat was training us so hard. We were working our tails off. It was hard work intended to break people.

“There were no leaders. There was no one to put your eyes on and see how it was done. I had an idea of it. I could do it, but [others at NC State] didn’t want to follow me because I was the brown-noser or coach’s guy, the outsider.”

To Popolizio’s recollection, year one featured eight walk-ons in the 10 starting spots in the lineup. The result was a 5-6 dual record, zero ACC victories, a fifth-place finish at the conference tournament and a 63rd-place showing at the NCAA Championships that nearly everybody interviewed for this story can still recall the exact number of, a decade later.

In or out

Given the lineup situation and some conflict between the few remaining holdovers and coaches, Gwiazdowski doesn’t hesitate to paint a grim picture of the time. The team lacked talent, and Popolizio’s aim was to make up ground with grittiness.

“It was a lot of just mean, tough wrestling, which is what he built his culture around,” Gwiazdowski said of Popolizio. “Which the guys do now. You know if you’re wrestling an NC State guy, he’s going to be a tough son of a b—-.

“That’s the expectation now, but then he was building it. You had to start it in the room. The [practice] matches were lasting long. Guys were getting beat up.

“The guys that bought in lasted, and the guys that didn’t went other places. … When you do enough of that, it gives you a special, hardened-over coating, like nothing can break me.”

Gwiazdowski recalls several teammates being kicked out of practice for low energy or not wrestling hard enough. The standard was set. And not meeting it was not an option.

“You could be the worst guy in the room, but if you were going hard you were good,” he said. “There was no wiggle room for guys to get through the cracks.”

The results were still tough to stomach.

“Guys eventually fell in line,” Gwiazdowski admitted, “but the team sucked. Pat changed that though. His persistence in doing so was world class.”

High goals

Popolizio never doubted what he could do at NC State. He wouldn’t have taken the job if he didn’t think he was capable of attaining his personal coaching goals in Raleigh.

“I didn’t want to go from Binghamton to NC State and then have to make one more jump to another school to win a national championship,” Popolizio said. “I’d just rather make the jump to a school where you can do that, and I thought this was a place you can make that happen.”

Popolizio has never been shy about his expectations or rules with recruits. The goal is an NCAA team title, and the path there involves strict discipline, on and off the mat.  

Yow admitted after the new coach took charge in Raleigh that “he was somewhat more strict than I had initially thought he would be … tougher than I would have been.”

But Popolizio found in previous experiences that wherever he set the standard “guys will reach it.”

“If you set the GPA expectation at 2.5, your guys are all going to get a 2.5,” he explained. “It’s the same for wrestling. It’s not OK to lose. It’s not OK to finish 63rd at the NCAA Tournament. So the culture was number one. How do you get guys to buy in? At the end of the day, you give them a choice to buy in or not.

“… Kids that are trying to win a national title, they don’t fear rules. Look at the [2016 recruiting] class that was No. 1 in the country. Those guys didn’t shy away from it. They’re like, ‘I’m trying to win a national title. I don’t care about whatever team rules or expectations you have — I have a higher standard for myself.”

Rising up

Popolizio mentioned the Wolfpack winning a national title when he first talked about Raleigh with Gwiazdowski, who knew enough about the college wrestling world at that time to say: “You’re f—ing nuts.”

He was not alone.

Gantt remembers in his first one-on-one meeting with Popolizio, the coach told him that “three or four years from now, we’ll be competing for a conference title and be in the top 25, top 10 at NCAAs.”

“In my head, I was like, there’s no way; this dude is just talking,” Gantt admitted now while looking back. “We were 63rd. I was like, ‘Uhhh … that sounds good. I’m bought in, but I don’t know where this is going to go.’”

The results weren’t immediate. By year two, Gantt and only one other wrestler remained from the previous coaching staff. And it made sense. Gwiazdowski remembers how demanding Popolizio and his staff were during that time.

“My second year at NC State, Debbie Yow was addressing the team; I showed up a minute or two late, and they suspended me,” he recalled with a chuckle. “They had to hold us accountable, and there’s only one way to do it, right?

“I understand why he did it. He had to set the precedent. … Then at the end of the year, after I won nationals, I said, ‘I came back! I was suspended from the team, but I rose from the ashes and won!’”

The team improved to 14-7 and beat two ACC foes, but slipped back to sixth at the conference tournament. However, Gwiazdowski’s NCAA performance alone was enough to put NC State on the map.

Popolizio said there were “too many distractions” to wrestle Gwiazdowski without any other real All-America contenders in the lineup during his first year in Raleigh, when Gwiazdowski redshirted. The heavyweight quickly returned to the spotlight after he upset the defending two-time champion for his first NCAA crown.

Popolizio had his first Raleigh success story, and Gwiazdowski powered the Pack to a 19th-place finish at NCAAs. NC State wrestling has not finished lower since then.

“That was huge, that was momentum,” the coach said. “When you’re building, you need some kind of reassurance that things are right. … It was, ‘Wait a second, if he can do it, I can do I it. I’m training right alongside this guy.’

“It hadn’t been done in a long time. And now all of a sudden, it happens, then it trickles down to the other guys.”

Lone wolf no more

Twelve months later, Gwiazdowski not only repeated as the NCAA champion, but he was joined on the All-America podium by a teammate — and not just any teammate, a true freshman that was on track to redshirt.

141-pounder Kevin Jack out of Danbury, Conn., wasn’t highly recruited, but saw enough from former club teammates wrestling for Popolizio to choose the Pack out of what he remembers were three options. He wasn’t unlike many of the recruits the program was signing at the time — under the radar, just like NC State wrestling. 

“When I was first getting recruited, I didn’t even know NC State was a school,” Jack said with a laugh. “It might sound bad now, especially with where we’re at now — a top-10, top-five program every year — but we’ve made some huge jumps since then.”

Despite a “bumpy first couple months,” and a fourth-place showing at the ACC Championships after getting thrown into the lineup when a teammate caught mono, Jack took the wrestling world by storm and placed fifth at the NCAA Championships.

That combined with Gwiazdowski’s second straight national title pushed the Pack up to 16th place. The culture was established and results changed — enough to alter the perception of NC State nationally.

“Now it was, ‘Wow, they can get these guys that weren’t top-100 recruits and all of a sudden start producing with them,’” Popolizio remembered. “People took notice and were like, ‘What the heck’s going on over there?’ That’s what happens when you get a true freshman to All-American who took fifth at Super 32 [a national high school wrestling tournament] to fifth at the NCAA Tournament in less than 12 months.”

“There were guys that wanted to follow Pat’s rules and mindset,” Gwiazdowski added. “The expectation was you were training all summer; there was no drinking. It’s not up for discussion; that’s how we do things.

“That will change a team fast; there aren’t a lot of teams that do that. And now he has the culture so guys are signing up to do that because they’re seeing the results.”

That culture, even moreso than the results, was the biggest difference between the program Gwiazdowski joined and NC State’s team now.

“I think it’s needed if you want to do big things,” said Gwiazdowski, who is now coaching at Cornell in addition to continuing his competitive career as a two-time world medalist. “You have to set hard guidelines, and that’s still the expectation.

“At the time, doing the right things stood out. Now if you do anything wrong, you stand out.”

NC State’s rise to national wrestling powerhouse isn’t over yet. Two top-20 NCAA finishes were just the beginning. Read part two here!