Building a Dream
May 11, 2005 02:07 PM | General
May 11, 2005
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Craig Turnbull used to stand outside the WVU Coliseum, point to a soggy patch of land between the Coliseum and the baseball field, and tell high school recruits they were going to wrestle there.
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| One rendering of what the new wrestling facility could look like when it is completed sometime next summer. WVU associate athletic director Russ Sharp says design work is expected to be completed around Memorial Day.
WVU Sports Communications |
Turnbull’s recruiting pitch may not have been an out-and-out con job, but it certainly did have the ring of being a little bit used-car salesman.
“Back then you had to be creative,” Turnbull explained.
‘Back then’ was the late 1970s and early 1980s when Turnbull, then a young coach trying to build the WVU wrestling program, was training his athletes in places you probably wouldn’t let your dog sleep.
The wrestling team’s first home was the dungeon on the first floor of the Coliseum, which basically was a utility area built for storage. There was absolutely no ventilation in the room and the people that did go in there were usually those persons wearing white space suits carrying sophisticated air monitoring equipment.
The team had to walk down a spiraled staircase past the garbage bins through the cold to get to their locker room.
“It was unbelievable,” said Turnbull. “The garbage bins were right below us and we could smell it as we were training. I never thought I’d be staying at this program first of all – I’d be here maybe a couple of years and then I’d get out of here.”
But things got better for Turnbull and his wrestlers – sort of. Realizing it couldn’t keep the wrestling team in the dungeon, the WVU administration found a new home for its wrestlers down at Stansbury Hall.
This time there were new obstacles for the wrestlers to overcome.
“They thought they were giving us an upgrade by moving us from the dungeon down to Stansbury. They had these old lofts and there were radiators on the wall where if people got mad at each other you could run them into the red-hot radiators,” Turnbull laughed. “There were doors that didn’t shut all the way and it had to be the only wrestling room in the country where snow blew in and you’d have to stop practice to clean snow off the mats.”
When Turnbull finally moved to his current place when the Shell Building was finished, his wrestlers thought they were entering the Taj Mahal.
“We really thought we were in heaven when they moved us into the room we are in now,” said Turnbull. “There were two mats, it was a nice room and we could control the heat and so forth.”
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| The area where the proposed new wrestling facility will be constructed.
WVU Sports Communications |
Sometimes Craig Turnbull has to pinch himself when he reflects on days gone by. His wrestling program has now hit warp speed following the announcement Monday that the WVU Board of Governors approved the construction of a $1.2 million, 9,000-square-foot state-of-the-art training complex adjacent to the WVU Natatorium that will be one of the finest of its kind in the country.
The facility has been made possible by a generous gift from the Hazel Ruby McQuain Charitable Trust. As it turns out, George Farmer, chairman of the McQuain Charitable Trust board of directors, was a longtime WVU wrestling fan that used to run the clock when Steve Harrick was winning Southern Conference championships in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He still attends matches when he has the opportunity.
To Turnbull and his WVU wrestlers, George Farmer was a godsend.
“This is a huge step in the ultimate goal of taking a big swing at winning a national championship,” Turnbull said.
Not a single speck of dirt has been moved and Turnbull can already rip off a lengthy list of ways the facility has impacted his program.
“In our last recruiting class we were already able to tell them of the possibility that this was all happening,” Turnbull said. “And this recruiting class we were able to show them color renditions. Last year our recruiting class was ranked seventh nationally and we anticipate this one to be a top-five recruiting class.”
The combination of the new facility and assistant coach Zeke Jones’ involvement with USA wrestling has now given West Virginia University the opportunity to become one of the primary destinations for world-class wrestlers. Jones can one day envision Morgantown, W.Va., being wrestling’s East Coast equivalent of Colorado Springs, where the country’s best athletes now live and train.
Jones had been discretely working on USA Wrestling to consider West Virginia University as one of its Sunkist Club training sites, on occasion making presentations to its board. The Sunkist Club is the top wrestling club in the world producing 65 world and Olympic medals during the past 25 years.
“They only attach Sunkist to the best universities,” Jones said.
Zeke got involved with Sunkist during his college days as an All-American wrestler at Arizona State. After years of prodding and as his career in USA wrestling took off, he finally convinced them to consider West Virginia University. Of course, the one catch was WVU having an adequate facility to train in.
“I felt an obligation to them to get something done and we really needed a quality facility,” Jones admitted. “If we were going to train world and Olympic champions we should have a facility that epitomizes that.”
During one of his presentations to the WVU athletic department, Sunkist Kids and Mylan Laboratories, Turnbull sensed the timing was right to pull out some old drawings he had stuffed in his office drawer.
“(WVU Director of Athletics) Ed Pastilong asked me if the size of the room we had now was adequate,” Turnbull recalled. “I said, ‘No, and as a matter of fact …’ I pulled out the drawings someone had donated to me and the rest of the people at the meeting just started grinning.
“It was kind of just luck intersecting with opportunity,” Turnbull said.
Turnbull and Jones were able to secure a partnership with Mylan to set up a program where the country’s best wrestlers can now move to Morgantown and work here while they are training for the Olympics. When Farmer came through with the funds for the new facility, all of the pieces to the puzzle finally fell into place.
“Dominic Black, Dean Morrison and Sam Kline all wrestled here, but when they graduated they had to move to Colorado to get that next tier of training,” Jones said. “Now they don’t have to do that – they can train right here in Morgantown with the rest of the elite East Coast wrestlers.”
Jones sees many other benefits as well.
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| West Virginia's current wrestling training facility inside the WVU Shell Building.
WVU Sports Communications |
“This gives West Virginians something to be proud of,” he said. “We can be proud that Olympic athletes will now be training in our state. This will also give young kids something to dream about.
“This facility will not only service our WVU wrestling program and our U.S. Olympic training program but Team West Virginia, which goes to the Junior Nationals, will come and train here every year. The Mountaineer Wrestling Club of kids aged five to 18 will also train in this facility,” Jones said.
Turnbull sees the structure as a culmination of 25 years worth of hard work.
“It’s been a pretty amazing journey from when I came here as a graduate assistant and I thought I had been in a time machine as far as the facilities and no one even understanding what the sport was,” he said.
“Now you’ve got the Cary Gymnastics facility on one side; you’ve got the beautiful new wrestling facility going on the other,” Turnbull noted. “Down from there you’ve got the brand new soccer facility and then you show people what’s going on inside the Coliseum … it impacts everyone. (Basketball coach) John Beilein hit it right when he said it really helps everybody.”
“Our athletic department has done a super job of stepping up all of our facilities,” Jones commented. “They are going to leave a legacy well beyond our time here. This wrestling facility will always be here. That’s what we’re all here to try and do – leave it a little better than when we started here.
“This will be Craig’s legacy.”
Turnbull’s mind sometimes drifts back to those days in the early 1980s when he was still young and full of vinegar, asking kids to try and visualize where the new wrestling room was going to be.
Of course his campus tours never included visiting the old one.
“I just told them that they were going to help build this place,” he said. “Luckily back then most of them didn’t ask.”
Thanks to George Farmer and the Hazel Ruby McQuain Charitable Trust, today they don’t have to.
