When Muhlenberg College takes the mat Saturday, Jan. 17, at Kings Point for dual meets with McDaniel and Washington & Lee, it’ll be the first time since the 2008-09 season the Mules will field a full 10-man lineup in a Centennial Conference meet.
That’s a huge step forward for a program that has “competed” in dual meets with as few as two wrestlers over the last five years.
“The guys are amped up,” first-year coach Shaun Lally said. “We have a team now.”
After a strong first decade of the new millennium, Muhlenberg’s wrestling program nearly disintegrated into dust.
Muhlenberg finished among the top four in the Centennial Conference tournament in eight of 10 years between 2000 and 2009, including three second-place finishes. The Mules had 22 NCAA Division III championship qualifiers over that span, including six All-Americans, most recently 149-pounder Rob Kein in 2009.
However, because of low numbers, the Mules have won just two dual meets over the past five years, and they’ve finished last in the Centennial Conference tournament in each of the last three years.
A year ago, the Mules had just eight wrestlers on the roster and never fielded more than four in a dual meet.
Things are looking a little bit brighter this year under Lally, a Parkland graduate who wasn’t hired until mid-October.
The roster features 14 names, the most since 2009-10 (16). Eight of those 14 are freshmen, and the roster includes only one senior —- first-time collegiate wrestler Ian Gimbar from Saucon Valley, who won an individual title last weekend in the Long Island Open.
The energetic Lally, who recently turned 32, has enthusiastically accepted the challenge of building the Mules into a dominant Division III program. He started a wrestling club at Stony Brook in 2011 and oversaw its admission to the National Collegiate Wrestling Association, composed of schools where wrestling doesn’t hold varsity status.
Last fall he was about to begin his third season with the Seawolves when he learned Muhlenberg was looking for a coach to replace Jake Calhoun, who suffered severe heatstroke at a wrestling tournament in Florida in June and was facing a liver transplant.
Lally, who hopes his part-time position becomes full time — “I work like it’s full time” he quipped — jumped at the chance to return home and try to resurrect, or elevate, the program.
“I had built Stony Brook from the ground up, and I had a lot of personal attachments. But I used to live near Wegmans [in Allentown] and I used to jog past Muhlenberg on my training runs and wonder why there wasn’t more buzz [in the Lehigh Valley] about the program there,” Lally said.
“I’ve always felt this program was a diamond-in-the-rough,” he added. “At Stony Brook [we started wrestling] with a minimal budget, no alumni, and we were able to accomplish things by thinking outside the box. Here, we have those resources. That’s one of the things that drew me back.
“Look at its history — Dan Terpstra, [four-time conference champ from Bangor] Jason Rute [conference champ from Easton], A.J. Bucko [three-time champ from Northampton]. Now, we have two Pennsylvania boys on the roster, and they’re our best wrestlers — Gimbar and [Wilson’s Jaryd] Flank. We get two or three District 11 kids a year, all of a sudden we’re talking about a Top 25 Division III program.”
So far Muhlenberg’s schedule has been dominated by tournaments, which Lally said have “introduced” his youngsters to college wrestling.
“They’ve made adjustments and they’ve been learning, progression,” he said. “They’ve seen measurable results and that makes it easier to commit to the work needed to improve.”
The Mules sent 10 wrestlers to the mat in their lone dual meet so far, a 25-17 loss to Southern Maine at the Grapple in the Garden in New York City on Dec. 21.
“It came down to heavyweight and he might’ve won, but we coached him to pin [need to win the match] and he got caught in some moves,” Lally said. “But last year we lost to that team 59-0.”