DSU
WRESTLING REVIEW
D I C K I N S O N
Now that wrestling season is finally underway, I get to spend countless hours with the
guys on the team and the wonderful coaching staff.
S T A T E
U N I V E R S I T Y
DECEMBER 2011
For those of you who do not know my background in the wrestling program, I have been
around wrestling my entire life. My father is Coach O’Donnell, he has taught me everything I
know about wrestling, and he has also sparked my love of the sport. I started officially traveling with the team last year, which was my freshman year at Dickinson State. As I was
growing up my family has been inseparable from the sport of wrestling, we would be at every dual and tournament possible. I not only wanted to be a wrestling manager/stat keeper
because I love wrestling but also because my mom traveled with the team when my dad was
wrestling. The stories and memories she has formed getting to know the team members
and building great friends was something I wish to experience also.
BLUE HAWKS
BY DANIELLE O’DONNELL
I have gotten to know a lot of the guys from being around them all the time when I was
growing up. A couple wrestlers from time to time have even lived with us during the summer and my mom taught them how to bake cookies, and some have also traveled with us to my visit my grandparents ranch,
where at the age of 10 I taught three California boys how to drive a manual pickup.
Every Thanksgiving my family invites all the wrestlers who are not able to travel home to spend the holiday with us, hanging
out, eating turkey, participating in paintball tournaments, Wii tournaments and playing board games. My family has always shared
a special relationship with past and current wrestlers. This makes it special to get to know them as well. Now that I am about the
same age as the team, instead of always being the “little sister”, I have enjoyed being able to have classes together, hang out, and
see the guys around campus. It has been a big change for me going from being the “little sister”, to “coach’s daughter”. Hearing
“coach’s daughter” tends to scare some of the new guys right away. By time Nationals and the end of the regular season rolls
around, the new guys and the rest of the team start to treat me as just another “one of the guys”.
DSU WRESTLING
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WRESTLING REVIEW
WRESTLING REVIEW
The Blue Hawk Experience
Outside the comfort zone
BY ADAM ORTON
Welcome to Blue Hawk wrestling. This year’s team is
a great group of young men with an outstanding work
ethic. We have added to our pre-season a “back to basics” workout to ready the team for the grind of the regular season. We implemented workouts that included a
lot of sand bag and tractor tire work. The guys worked
very hard and made it a very fun fall. Stadium steps and
long runs were also a huge factor in the pre-season
workouts. Team runs/ lifts/tires/ sandbag workouts
were always set up to test them both physically as well
as mentally. Sometimes we had to come back the next
day and let them prove they could accomplish what we
asked. When an old man finished ahead of half the
team in a five mile run they regrouped and began to
understand what getting outside their comfort zone
really meant. This team showed its sprit when challenged. The pre-season led us up to our team camp
which we began the first of October. The camp helped
the newcomers with the transition into our wrestling
room. This team is one of the funniest groups that I
have been around and I can’t wait to see what it devel-
It’s unbelievable what four years can do. My parents told me
when I was first leaving for college that “college is the best time of
your life, so have fun and remember why you are there”. I have to
agree, there are times that I will never forget, and lessons that I
could never have learned if I hadn’t come here. That statement is
doubled because of my involvement in Blue Hawk Wrestling.
Looking back, I remember getting recruiting letters from schools
all over the nation. Letters from Division one, two and three
schools, junior colleges, and a division I’d never even heard of before (NAIA) came to my house. . I ended up choosing Northwest
Wyoming; a school that I knew was consistently ranked in the top five for junior colleges, hoping it would get me a solid foundation
when I transferred to a bigger school but Northwest didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. My friend Jordan Ewen asked me to come
with him on a recruiting trip to DSU. I knew they had a tough team because we went the Dickinson Classic that year and they took
3rd that season. I was skeptical though because I was raised in the mountains with a fly fishing stream never more than a half hour
drive away, and I couldn’t picture myself in the Midwest. But I remembered why I was there, to wrestle, so I went with him. There
were a lot of factors about the school I liked including small classes and a dedicated team that was high in numbers so I decided to
take the chance and come to Dickinson.
Oddly enough, when I got here, I discovered that all of my teammates seemed to be mountain boys like myself, from Wyoming
and Montana, with a few exceptions from California. It was good to have such a diverse wrestling room with diverse wrestling
room with multiple partners that were willing to push me and themselves. The practices were my style, fast tempo and intense.
Unfortunately, during my first two seasons I was cursed with an ankle injury that refused to heal. It was a rare occasion that I was
able to compete, but when I could, I worked hard.
ops into this year and the following seasons to come. So far we have had six National Qualifiers. They include Sophomore, 125 lb.,
Bryden Lazaro, Senior , 141 lb., Adam Orton, Junior, 197 lb., Kevin Keisler, Sophomore, 149 lb., Brad Steele, Freshman, 133 lb.,
Clayton Steinmetz and Freshman Austin “Rudy” Frasier . We are finishing up our fall semester with the annual wrestlers Olympics
which includes several wrestling and non-wrestling events. I will keep you posted on the results in the next newsletter.
After my second season, I bought a house and moved to Dickinson. Approaching my third season, I was more psyched than ever, I was the top dog in the room at my weight, and I was finally healthy. I started off well; qualified for the national tournament at
our first tournament and became ranked in the top ten in my weight class and I was proving to myself that I was supposed to be
there too. I beat some tough opponents, learned some lessons and wrestled an exciting match against an opponent that took second in the NCAA finals. I learned my potential at that point.
Thadd O’Donnell—Head Coach
NAIA vs. NCAA: Fighting the misperception
Unfortunately, the pressure got to me. My performance at the national tournament was a total bust. Two and out to opponents that I knew I should have beat. That’s the worst feeling in the world. Coach O’Donnell is always saying “no regrets”, or never
say “I wish”, “I should have” or “I could have done something different”. I guess that’s the best part of the sport. I’m constantly
tested, sometimes I pass, and sometimes I fail. Now I’m working to get better still and I’m visualizing, remembering, and executing
what I need to do so that doesn’t happen again.
Most potential high school wrestling recruits have a perception of college wrestling and think they understand the competitiveness needed to step on a college mat, but in reality it takes a couple tourneys to gain a real perspective. The media paints a picture of levels in college sports from NAIA, NCAA D1, D2, and in some sports it maybe accurate but wrestling it’s a different story.
We compete against all divisions throughout the year except for post-season. When we go to a tourney that has Northern Iowa,
NDSU, U of Minnesota or Ridgewater Junior College it doesn’t take long for the guys to learn that wrestling is wrestling. Every
team is going to have great wrestlers and average wrestlers. Some teams have better depth but all are beatable and all are capable of beating anyone. The propaganda out there is for recruiting purposes. All NCAA D2 schools sell the media and high school
coaches on the “level” of their division because the NCAA labels its divisions that way. The only difference is the level of funding,
with the NCAA having more to work with than the NAIA schools. If NCAA D2 was a stand-alone division it would be very similar to
NAIA. But D2 has a big brother, so to speak, which is NCAA D1 and its logo. I battle the perception every year and try to educate
high school coaches and parents by saying its like Ford vs. Chevy- two different organizations fighting for the same customers. We
just need to produce the best product we can every year.
Its now my last year of eligibility. My last year to make it happen. My last year to be an All-American and the pressure is on, but
I can’t let it stop me. As I was moving out of my house back home this last summer, I found a box with all my old recruiting letters.
I started looking through them again with a new curiosity and I saw letters from schools I’ve competed against, ones that I’m extremely thankful that I didn’t look into. At the bottom of that box I saw a stack of letters and packets that were all from the same
school and it was the biggest stack by far, and only one letter was open. The envelope read Dickinson State University. This made
me laugh because I knew back in high school I couldn’t have pictured myself going to North Dakota for school. But seeing that this
stack was the biggest, that DSU put more effort in recruiting me than any other school, I can’t help think that me coming here was
the best thing I could have done before I even knew it was. And I’m now here to stay because I want to be involved in this program as long as I can.
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TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE DSU WRESTLING PROGRAM CALL THE DSU FOUNDATION AT (701) 483-2004
TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE DSU WRESTLING PROGRAM CALL THE DSU FOUNDATION AT (701) 483-2004