MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — When West Virginia’s wrestling team was recruiting in-state product Peyton Hall, the Mountaineers were in the midst of four consecutive losing seasons. The success of legendary head coach Craig Turnbull was becoming a fading memory.
Tim Flynn assumed the duties of WVU wrestling head coach in 2018 and steadied the ship. A handful of years later, the Mountaineers are enjoying success not seen since Turnbull was at the helm.
“It’s lightyears ahead of where it was whenever I first got here,” Peyton Hall said on the Gold and Blue Nation Podcast earlier this month.
As a true freshman in 2021, Hall, now a two-time All-American, helped deliver WVU its first winning season on the mats since 2014. Another main driving force behind the first winning season in seven years was Flynn, who was then in his third year in charge of the program.
Flynn came to West Virginia after 21 stellar years at Division II Edinboro. The Annapolis, Maryland, native guided the Fighting Scots to 223 victories, 15 EWL Championship trophies and 14 top-20 finishes in the NCAA Championships, including back-to-back top-five placements in 2014 and 15.
Decades of success on the mats in Pennsylvania, first as an athlete at Penn State and later as a coach with Edinboro, put Flynn on the radars of many players within the wrestling community. Among them was a high schooler, like Hall, who, as a standout himself, bounced back and forth between the Mountain State and the wrestling-rich Keystone State.
“I had trust in that coaching staff before I got here, and that played a big part in my decision coming here,” Hall said. “Seeing the way it’s unfolded is awesome.”
When Hall arrived in Morgantown in the fall of 2020, Flynn was still in the early stages of building a consistent winner. But perception had not caught up to reality.
“Whenever I first got here, we were kind of looked down on. Like, the wrestling team was not held in high regards on campus,” Hall noted. “Not just athletically, but just the way people talked about us off the mat.
All-Americans Peyton Hall and Ty Watters join the show – The Gold and Blue Nation Podcast
Killian Cardinale capped off the 2021 season by becoming the second Mountaineer in Flynn’s tenure to earn All-American honors. Hall wrestled his way to a podium finish at the NCAAs a year later. The 2023 season showed how far Flynn’s group had come.
Flynn coached the WVU wrestling team to double-digit wins in the regular season for only the sixth time in a season without Turnbull in charge. The team made its first appearance in the NWCA Top 25 since 2016, ranking as high as No. 23 in the nation after defeating a nationally ranked Pitt squad. Individually, Flynn’s group attained more ranked wrestlers than any Mountaineer team since 2003, and more wrestlers competed at the NCAAs than any WVU team since 2012. Cardinale became a two-time All-American that season, becoming just the eighth West Virginia grappler to earn multiple All-American honors in his career.
“Out staff does a really good job of developing kids. You know, that starts with recruiting and then development. And now we’re starting to get these kids in the program for a couple years,” Flynn said in a recent episode of the WVU Coaches Show. “Our heavyweight, Michael [Wolfgram], has been in the program for five years and Austin Cooley now a couple years, and so all these kids. And then you get a nice transfer in in Jett (Strickenberger). And I think it’s just, the kids are getting a little bit better every year and it’s growing the way it’s supposed to grow.”
West Virginia took its next step in 2024. Among the talent that Flynn had collected in the latest recruiting class was two-time Pennsylvania state champion Ty Watters, the third-ranked high school wrestler in the country in his weight class.
Watters and Hall have known each other since their youth wrestling days.
“We wrestle a lot alike, and I saw that they were really getting him to jump levels and they got him to All-American,” Watters said during an interview for the Gold and Blue Nation Podcst. “So, I was like, if they can get that style, because it’s a hard style to coach, so I was like if they can get that style working then I definitely want to be there.”
In his first season that the collegiate level, Watters, with his finess and “slick stuff” style, turned into one of the best wrestlers in the Big 12. He captured a Big 12 title at 149 pounds, becoming the first Mountaineer freshman to win a conference championship since 2006.
As a team, West Virginia rose all the way to No. 16 in the weekly Dual Rankings by FloWrestling and No. 17 in the Coaches Poll, marking the program’s highest placement in the poll since 2005. At least eight Mountaineers were individually ranked, either by FloWrestling or in the coaches poll, for a majority of the season, also marking recent high marks. West Virginia finished the regular season with double-digit wins in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 1990-91.
“It’s a team effort,” Hall said. “We have so many people that are just there for us in everything we need. It’s hard to really not want to achieve your goals, especially whenever it’s not just for yourself, it’s for a greater good.”
“So, I think that’s definitely changing a lot,” he added. “The culture is definitely starting to shift in the right direction. We have really good team chemistry, everybody on the team gets along well. We have a great relationship with our coaches. It’s a lot more fun.”
One of the most successful seasons on the mats in recent history crescendoed at the NCAA Championships in Kansas City. For the first time since 2011-12, at least half of the Mountaineers’ starting lineup qualified for the NCAAs. Four or more grapplers have qualified for the national tournament in every year of Flynn’s tenure.
With a seventh-place finish at 165 pounds, Hall captured All-American honors for a second time in three years. More impressively, with his fourth-place finish at 149 pounds, Watters became just the third true freshman in program history to claim All-America status, and only the 13th wrestler in program history to win a conference title and reach the national podium in the same season.
As a team, West Virginia finished 17th in the country with 31.5 points, which was the best placement since 2004 and the seventh-most points all-time. To say there was plenty to be excited about in the Old Gold and Blue singlets is an understatement, but make no mistake, the Mountaineers view this as just the beginning.
“Where you’re at is where you finish,” Flynn said. “We’re the 17th-best tournament team, and we’re the, whatever we finished, 18 in the dual-meet season. I think what it says is we’re a top-20 program. Our guys are still hungry, I know our staff is really hungry. So, hopefully that means the next step is trying to get into the top 15, the top 10. But, we really want to have some consistency, too. We don’t want to be a, hey good one year, not so good (the next year). So, if we can kind of remain up there that’s the goal, as well.”
After roughly nine days of recovery, the Mountaineers were back in the gym, already working toward the 2025 season at the start of April.
Hall, already signed up for his fifth and final season with WVU, is as integral as anyone in the improved culture within and surrounding the Mountaineer wrestling program. His success has shown young wrestlers like Hall that Flynn and WVU can win with any wrestling style, and his enhanced work ethic and preperation is positively infectious.
“They see you having success, and then they notice you’re not one of the ones out doing all of the stuff that’s shining a bad light, and that becomes contagious,” he said. “Where people start seeing what you’re doing, and seeing the success you’re having, and then one other person starts doing it. And then they see them having success, and it’s just a domino effect. A lot of the guys on our team are really buying in and really serious about what we’re doing here.”
For only the second time in its 100-year history, Flynn’s Mountaineers have captured at least one All-America honor in five straight seasons. Flynn has three top 100 athletes in this year’s recruiting class committed to the program, including Pennsylvania’s Rune Lawrence, the No. 18 overall recruit in the country.
Adding a strong recruiting to an already deep lineup and rotation is yet another example of how far Flynn has brought WVU.
“I believe Tim Flynn is the G.O.A.T., definitely in the top five greatest of all-time coaches for college, Watters said. “He just finds a way to elevate every program, even when he was at Edinboro. Even our next year’s recruiting class is going to be really good. Now that kids are seeing what he can really do, and it’s starting to show, I think it’s going to show a lot next year. I think our recruiting classes are going to get a lot better. And then obviously that just elevates our team even more, and the environment, and everything.”
