Photo by: All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks
Opportunity Awaits for WVU's Flynn
April 17, 2018 05:20 PM | Wrestling
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Tony Robie says he probably talks to Tim Flynn a couple of times a week just to bounce ideas off of him.
Robie, now Virginia Tech's head coach after once wrestling for Flynn at Edinboro, could sense this year might finally be the year for Flynn to make a career move.
Others have called and Flynn has usually listened, most recently last year when Pitt tried to hire him away for its open wrestling position, but the reasons for him to stay at Edinboro were always more compelling than trying to invent ones to leave.
He had built a powerhouse program at Edinboro, a Division II school in all other sports except wrestling, located not too far from Erie, Pennsylvania, but the years were beginning to add up - 21 as a head coach and 26 overall after taking over for legend Bruce Baumgartner, a wrestling heavyweight in every sense of the word.
Baumgartner, a two-time Olympic Gold medalist, wanted an administrative job in 1997 so he became his own boss as the school's athletic director when he realized Flynn was the right guy to coach the wrestling team.
Since then, Flynn has developed three national champions and 38 All-Americans, and his Fighting Scots have usually had a fighting chance at nationals, but it was getting harder and harder for him to maintain the same level of success.
Beating the other team's wrestlers is one thing, but also having to beat their budgets is something else entirely.
"It was getting harder for him to maintain the same level of success he was accustomed to at Edinboro," Robie, who spent one year here as a graduate assistant coach under Craig Turnbull, explained. "Tim is an incredibly competitive guy, and he hates to lose. I think he saw the opportunity at West Virginia - like a lot of people in the sport of wrestling - as a program with tons of untapped potential because of the school, the facilities, the resources and geographically where it's located, so I wasn't surprised at all.
"I know he's passed on a lot of jobs in the past, and I think it was a matter of the right situation presenting itself and the timing as much as anything," Robie added.
The timing was certainly right.
He has one son in college and another is a senior in high school. He's still relatively young, so it was time to attack a new challenge, just like he did when he was an All-American wrestler at Penn State in the mid-1980s after growing up in Vista, California until moving to Annapolis, Maryland for his final year of high school.
And Vista, California, to Annapolis, Maryland, to State College, Pennsylvania, is not exactly a straight line like the drive he made down Interstate 79 from Edinboro to Morgantown.
West Virginia University, of course, is much, much bigger than Edinboro, but it possesses the same small-town values upon which Flynn has built his career - honesty, integrity, accountability and dependability.
You ask anybody in the wrestling profession about Tim Flynn and the first thing they will say is that he's an A-plus human being.
"Despite all of the success he's had as a coach, he's just a really good man," Ohio State's Tom Ryan said. Ryan got to know Flynn well when he coached at Hofstra and was trying to solve the same problems Flynn was solving on another small-budget school. "He's honest, and I think at the end of the day, I'd rather be remembered for being honest than all of the titles I won. He's got that."
There's an old sports adage - if you can't beat 'em then hire 'em. That's basically what WVU director of athletics Shane Lyons has done with the Mountaineer wrestling program.
Flynn certainly had lots of success against West Virginia, his underfunded Edinboro teams beating the fully-funded Mountaineers 15 times, including four of the last five times they've met since 2015.
"I didn't know the record exactly, but I knew we didn't beat his teams too often and if you look at it more closely we're carrying the full limit of scholarships and he had five, six scholarships to give each year," Lyons pointed out. "And a lot of that he had to fundraise because the funding sources he once had at Edinboro were tapering off."
At Edinboro, he not only coached his guys, he also kept up with them academically, did the bed checks, drove the van, bought the equipment, filled out the travel vouchers, paid the hotel bills, organized their workouts, kept track of what they ate and probably dabbled in a little bit of counseling and psychology as well.
Most of that stuff will be taken care of for him at West Virginia.
"The other night I was talking to him on the phone, and he was down there with his assistant coaches, and they got him three hotel rooms, and he was adamant that he wanted only one hotel room for all three of them," Robie chuckled. "That's because he was at Edinboro for a long time, and he's been used to doing so much with not a lot - probably more than you can imagine doing - so it's going to be an adjustment for him."
Oklahoma head coach Lou Rosselli, who began his coaching career with Flynn at Edinboro, said the only thing similar about West Virginia and Edinboro is the wrestlers.
Everything else is completely different.
"Now, you have facilities people," he said. "Now, you have marketing people. Now, you have donors, and I think when you are at a small school you really learn how to coach and do all the little things with how you handle people. It will be good for him to learn a different way of doing things, and I think it will help him get better.
"And he was already good."
In the same vein, don't discount the small-college coaching experience either. A lot of the innovation you see in sports today has its roots in the small college ranks because coaches there have to be resourceful.
Oftentimes, they have to think on their feet and solve problems in creative ways. Ryan explains.
"You're not handed anything," he said. "You've got to think for yourself, and you've got to reason and find solutions. Tim lived through that at Edinboro. It's made him very resourceful, and it's taught him every aspect of the job.
"Sometimes, we hire people that haven't really suffered through, for a lack of a better word, to get their opportunity and Tim has, which is why he's really good at what he does."
Ryan said when he got to Ohio State, it took him a while to adjust to all of the resources he had at his disposal.
"It was a real blessing," he admitted. "I was no longer buried under a pile of paper and now someone else can be. For me, there was no question there was a learning curve despite the fact that I learned so much at Hofstra.
"When I came to Ohio State, I couldn't believe the number of people that were experts in their own field that could help me solve problems and create new opportunities," Ryan continued. "On the recruiting front, with all of the football games and the things you can do to establish strong relationships with prospects, there is just so much more at my disposal and it took a little time to figure out just how to make all of the pieces work."
It was the same deal for Rosselli when he went to Oklahoma.
"You get 15 things on your plate, and you narrow it down to seven, and you can be a little bit more focused," he said. "You order your gear and you count t-shirts. Now you've got people to do all of that. 'Hey, I need a pair of shoes.' I don't have to think about that anymore. I've got it. Done. It makes it easier to handle some of those situations where I spent half my day doing things besides getting recruits or developing wrestlers. You've got to manage your time really well when you're at a small school because there is a lot going on."
"Here, Tim can focus on coaching and recruiting," Lyons said.
Ryan, Rosselli and Robie agree that Flynn is sitting on a gold mine at West Virginia University because of its close proximity to great high school wrestling.
Unlike many of West Virginia's coaches who have to hop on an airplane to help build their rosters, Flynn can get in his car and see everyone he needs to see and still be home in time for dinner.
There are that many good wrestlers located right in WVU's backyard.
"West Virginia is a really good job," Ryan said. "At West Virginia, you're in a great wrestling region if you look at where the elite wrestlers are growing up and the large majority of them are in the Northeast region of the country. Obviously, you're close to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, and it's a beautiful part of the country with a lot to offer."
"As you know, that Pittsburgh area is really sound, and if you can pull some of those WPIAL kids … with just them alone you can field a pretty good team if you train them right and develop them," Rosselli mentioned.
Rosselli actually has one wrestler from North Allegheny on his roster and another PA wrestler signed from nearby Johnstown. "It's a really nice pocket up there," he said.
"The great thing about that area is there are plenty of good kids to go around, and they can't all go to Penn State," Robie added. "The depth in recruiting in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey is outstanding and West Virginia has traditionally had success in all of those areas. Tim's got relationships built, especially in Pennsylvania and Ohio where they have done really well at Edinboro in recruiting, and I think everybody realizes that within the sport of wrestling."
For a variety of reasons, West Virginia, despite being so close to great high school wrestling, has struggled to field winning teams, the Mountaineers compiling a 27-39 record over the last four seasons.
But the beauty of this sport is that it doesn't take many wrestlers to get your program right. Just getting a couple of them to the podium at NCAAs can get you into the top 20. Ryan's Buckeyes got eight there in March and came within eight points of unseating Penn State as this year's national champion.
Robie sent three of his Hokie wrestlers to the podium this year and finished eighth.
"We've had as many as six and finished fourth in the country," he pointed out. "A lot of that is if you can get guys who can get you a lot of bonus points and that also helps you at nationals. When you look at where West Virginia is currently, they've got one returning NCAA All-American, so it can happen pretty fast."
It has happened before at West Virginia when Turnbull had things rolling, and Lyons is confident that it can happen again with Tim Flynn now running the show.
"I'd like to see it top 20, top 15 perennially, and then have those years like he's had at Edinboro where we're in the top five and we're shooting for a national championship," Lyons said.
The guys he will be going up against next year believe it can happen as well - and happen pretty quickly, too.
"You guys got yourself a good one, and he's going to do some good things there," Rosselli said. "For him and his family, it's just a great opportunity to go and do something different and have a little bit more help and more resources. Obviously, he's in the Big 12, too, and it helps the Big 12 that we've got another really good coach who is going to run a really good program."
"It's hard to see Tim leave," Baumgartner, his old boss, told an Erie television station last week. "But I think when you look at his goals and his aspirations to try and be a top-10 coach and get in there and maybe win a national championship, it's very difficult at an Edinboro University, especially in the climate in the state system of higher education today. I think this is a good move for Tim, and I think it's a new beginning for Edinboro wrestling."
"You are getting a guy who cares about people, who works incredibly hard, is a selfless guy and puts others before himself on a daily basis and is a great leader," Robie added. "A big part of that is people admire him and want to win for him as much as anything else."
The phone calls between Robie and Flynn will certainly continue, as will the family vacations, but since the two are now at rival schools, their conversations may revolve a little bit more around their families instead of work.
Particularly now, considering they are chasing the same high school wrestlers - and Flynn is finally on more equal footing.
Robie, now Virginia Tech's head coach after once wrestling for Flynn at Edinboro, could sense this year might finally be the year for Flynn to make a career move.
Others have called and Flynn has usually listened, most recently last year when Pitt tried to hire him away for its open wrestling position, but the reasons for him to stay at Edinboro were always more compelling than trying to invent ones to leave.
He had built a powerhouse program at Edinboro, a Division II school in all other sports except wrestling, located not too far from Erie, Pennsylvania, but the years were beginning to add up - 21 as a head coach and 26 overall after taking over for legend Bruce Baumgartner, a wrestling heavyweight in every sense of the word.
Baumgartner, a two-time Olympic Gold medalist, wanted an administrative job in 1997 so he became his own boss as the school's athletic director when he realized Flynn was the right guy to coach the wrestling team.
Since then, Flynn has developed three national champions and 38 All-Americans, and his Fighting Scots have usually had a fighting chance at nationals, but it was getting harder and harder for him to maintain the same level of success.
Beating the other team's wrestlers is one thing, but also having to beat their budgets is something else entirely.
"It was getting harder for him to maintain the same level of success he was accustomed to at Edinboro," Robie, who spent one year here as a graduate assistant coach under Craig Turnbull, explained. "Tim is an incredibly competitive guy, and he hates to lose. I think he saw the opportunity at West Virginia - like a lot of people in the sport of wrestling - as a program with tons of untapped potential because of the school, the facilities, the resources and geographically where it's located, so I wasn't surprised at all.
"I know he's passed on a lot of jobs in the past, and I think it was a matter of the right situation presenting itself and the timing as much as anything," Robie added.
The timing was certainly right.
He has one son in college and another is a senior in high school. He's still relatively young, so it was time to attack a new challenge, just like he did when he was an All-American wrestler at Penn State in the mid-1980s after growing up in Vista, California until moving to Annapolis, Maryland for his final year of high school.
And Vista, California, to Annapolis, Maryland, to State College, Pennsylvania, is not exactly a straight line like the drive he made down Interstate 79 from Edinboro to Morgantown.
West Virginia University, of course, is much, much bigger than Edinboro, but it possesses the same small-town values upon which Flynn has built his career - honesty, integrity, accountability and dependability.
You ask anybody in the wrestling profession about Tim Flynn and the first thing they will say is that he's an A-plus human being.
"Despite all of the success he's had as a coach, he's just a really good man," Ohio State's Tom Ryan said. Ryan got to know Flynn well when he coached at Hofstra and was trying to solve the same problems Flynn was solving on another small-budget school. "He's honest, and I think at the end of the day, I'd rather be remembered for being honest than all of the titles I won. He's got that."
There's an old sports adage - if you can't beat 'em then hire 'em. That's basically what WVU director of athletics Shane Lyons has done with the Mountaineer wrestling program.
Flynn certainly had lots of success against West Virginia, his underfunded Edinboro teams beating the fully-funded Mountaineers 15 times, including four of the last five times they've met since 2015.
"I didn't know the record exactly, but I knew we didn't beat his teams too often and if you look at it more closely we're carrying the full limit of scholarships and he had five, six scholarships to give each year," Lyons pointed out. "And a lot of that he had to fundraise because the funding sources he once had at Edinboro were tapering off."
At Edinboro, he not only coached his guys, he also kept up with them academically, did the bed checks, drove the van, bought the equipment, filled out the travel vouchers, paid the hotel bills, organized their workouts, kept track of what they ate and probably dabbled in a little bit of counseling and psychology as well.
Most of that stuff will be taken care of for him at West Virginia.
"The other night I was talking to him on the phone, and he was down there with his assistant coaches, and they got him three hotel rooms, and he was adamant that he wanted only one hotel room for all three of them," Robie chuckled. "That's because he was at Edinboro for a long time, and he's been used to doing so much with not a lot - probably more than you can imagine doing - so it's going to be an adjustment for him."
Oklahoma head coach Lou Rosselli, who began his coaching career with Flynn at Edinboro, said the only thing similar about West Virginia and Edinboro is the wrestlers.
Everything else is completely different.
"Now, you have facilities people," he said. "Now, you have marketing people. Now, you have donors, and I think when you are at a small school you really learn how to coach and do all the little things with how you handle people. It will be good for him to learn a different way of doing things, and I think it will help him get better.
"And he was already good."
In the same vein, don't discount the small-college coaching experience either. A lot of the innovation you see in sports today has its roots in the small college ranks because coaches there have to be resourceful.
Oftentimes, they have to think on their feet and solve problems in creative ways. Ryan explains.
"You're not handed anything," he said. "You've got to think for yourself, and you've got to reason and find solutions. Tim lived through that at Edinboro. It's made him very resourceful, and it's taught him every aspect of the job.
"Sometimes, we hire people that haven't really suffered through, for a lack of a better word, to get their opportunity and Tim has, which is why he's really good at what he does."
Ryan said when he got to Ohio State, it took him a while to adjust to all of the resources he had at his disposal.
"It was a real blessing," he admitted. "I was no longer buried under a pile of paper and now someone else can be. For me, there was no question there was a learning curve despite the fact that I learned so much at Hofstra.
"When I came to Ohio State, I couldn't believe the number of people that were experts in their own field that could help me solve problems and create new opportunities," Ryan continued. "On the recruiting front, with all of the football games and the things you can do to establish strong relationships with prospects, there is just so much more at my disposal and it took a little time to figure out just how to make all of the pieces work."
It was the same deal for Rosselli when he went to Oklahoma.
"You get 15 things on your plate, and you narrow it down to seven, and you can be a little bit more focused," he said. "You order your gear and you count t-shirts. Now you've got people to do all of that. 'Hey, I need a pair of shoes.' I don't have to think about that anymore. I've got it. Done. It makes it easier to handle some of those situations where I spent half my day doing things besides getting recruits or developing wrestlers. You've got to manage your time really well when you're at a small school because there is a lot going on."
"Here, Tim can focus on coaching and recruiting," Lyons said.
Ryan, Rosselli and Robie agree that Flynn is sitting on a gold mine at West Virginia University because of its close proximity to great high school wrestling.
Unlike many of West Virginia's coaches who have to hop on an airplane to help build their rosters, Flynn can get in his car and see everyone he needs to see and still be home in time for dinner.
There are that many good wrestlers located right in WVU's backyard.
"West Virginia is a really good job," Ryan said. "At West Virginia, you're in a great wrestling region if you look at where the elite wrestlers are growing up and the large majority of them are in the Northeast region of the country. Obviously, you're close to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, and it's a beautiful part of the country with a lot to offer."
"As you know, that Pittsburgh area is really sound, and if you can pull some of those WPIAL kids … with just them alone you can field a pretty good team if you train them right and develop them," Rosselli mentioned.
Rosselli actually has one wrestler from North Allegheny on his roster and another PA wrestler signed from nearby Johnstown. "It's a really nice pocket up there," he said.
"The great thing about that area is there are plenty of good kids to go around, and they can't all go to Penn State," Robie added. "The depth in recruiting in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey is outstanding and West Virginia has traditionally had success in all of those areas. Tim's got relationships built, especially in Pennsylvania and Ohio where they have done really well at Edinboro in recruiting, and I think everybody realizes that within the sport of wrestling."
For a variety of reasons, West Virginia, despite being so close to great high school wrestling, has struggled to field winning teams, the Mountaineers compiling a 27-39 record over the last four seasons.
But the beauty of this sport is that it doesn't take many wrestlers to get your program right. Just getting a couple of them to the podium at NCAAs can get you into the top 20. Ryan's Buckeyes got eight there in March and came within eight points of unseating Penn State as this year's national champion.
Robie sent three of his Hokie wrestlers to the podium this year and finished eighth.
"We've had as many as six and finished fourth in the country," he pointed out. "A lot of that is if you can get guys who can get you a lot of bonus points and that also helps you at nationals. When you look at where West Virginia is currently, they've got one returning NCAA All-American, so it can happen pretty fast."
It has happened before at West Virginia when Turnbull had things rolling, and Lyons is confident that it can happen again with Tim Flynn now running the show.
"I'd like to see it top 20, top 15 perennially, and then have those years like he's had at Edinboro where we're in the top five and we're shooting for a national championship," Lyons said.The guys he will be going up against next year believe it can happen as well - and happen pretty quickly, too.
"You guys got yourself a good one, and he's going to do some good things there," Rosselli said. "For him and his family, it's just a great opportunity to go and do something different and have a little bit more help and more resources. Obviously, he's in the Big 12, too, and it helps the Big 12 that we've got another really good coach who is going to run a really good program."
"It's hard to see Tim leave," Baumgartner, his old boss, told an Erie television station last week. "But I think when you look at his goals and his aspirations to try and be a top-10 coach and get in there and maybe win a national championship, it's very difficult at an Edinboro University, especially in the climate in the state system of higher education today. I think this is a good move for Tim, and I think it's a new beginning for Edinboro wrestling."
"You are getting a guy who cares about people, who works incredibly hard, is a selfless guy and puts others before himself on a daily basis and is a great leader," Robie added. "A big part of that is people admire him and want to win for him as much as anything else."
The phone calls between Robie and Flynn will certainly continue, as will the family vacations, but since the two are now at rival schools, their conversations may revolve a little bit more around their families instead of work.
Particularly now, considering they are chasing the same high school wrestlers - and Flynn is finally on more equal footing.
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