North Carolina State University Athletics
TIM PEELER: Goodman Attacks Wrestling, Football for Pack
1/29/2007 12:00:00 AM | Wrestling
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH, N.C. – Ryan Goodman isn’t the passive type. Few wrestlers are. Few people who have the drive to play two sports in college are. So you generally won’t find this wrestler/football player standing alone in the corner, waiting for someone else to make the first move.
“I think you could put Ryan in a group of men, from any background, any walk of life, and he would immediately become the alpha male in the group,” said NC State wrestling coach Carter Jordan. “Whether you put him with football players, basketball players accountants, whoever, if it has to do with physical and mental toughness, he’s going to rise right to the top.
“He’s the most competitive, intense athlete, I have ever been around.”
That certainly shows on the wrestling mats, where Goodman is one of the top performers in the ACC. In high school, Goodman was 77-1 as a junior and senior, winning back-to-back state championships. As a freshman last year, despite a knee injury that hampered him for five weeks in the heart of the season, Goodman was the 197-pound ACC Champion, compiling a 22-6 record. He was also named the ACC Championships Most Outstanding Wrestler. But it wasn’t as good as he wanted.
“Yeah, I won the ACCs, but I didn’t think I wrestled there as well as I could have,” Goodman said. “And I lost in the last 30 seconds to someone in nationals. I guess it was a good freshman year for me, but I really wanted to be a four-time All-America here.”
The Cape May, N.J., native is currently 13-2 and ranked 13th in the nation in the 197-pound weight class. He finished third in the Southern Scuffle, one of the top three open wrestling events in the nation. And he won a career-best 11 consecutive matches until losing a 5-4 decision over the weekend to 19th-ranked Hudson Taylor of Maryland, only the second loss to a conference opponent in his two years with the Wolfpack.
But Goodman was also accomplished enough as a high school football quarterback to be recruited to Nebraska and was No. 2 on the Cornhusker depth chart in 2004. He redshirted in wrestling in 2004-05 and was then told he couldn’t play football his second season. So Goodman opted to transfer to NC State, which at the time had Chuck Amato, who doubled as a linebacker and a two-time ACC champion heavyweight wrestler for the Wolfpack, as its head football coach.
Goodman sat out the 2005 season in football, and was moved to safety just prior to the 2006 season. He saw action in all 11 games, mostly on special teams, making four solo tackles.
“Moving to safety was the best chance for me, realistically, to get on the field,” Goodman said. I was a back-up safety and I got to play a lot on special teams. The biggest thing for me was getting on the field, no matter what position.”
Goodman is hoping that new Wolfpack football coach Tom O’Brien is OK with him playing two sports. The NCAA Wrestling Championships slated for March 15-17, right about the time that O’Brien has scheduled the start of spring practice. And since O’Brien has given his approval for wide receiver Darrell Davis to continue playing basketball, Goodman thinks his prospects to remain a dual-sport participant are pretty good.
However, playing football has an impact on Goodman’s ultimate goal for his college career: To become the Wolfpack’s fifth individual national champion. For most top-level competitors, wrestling is a year-round sport. Because of football, Goodman gets about four months to do the necessary work to be a champion.
“There is a lot of difference between football shape and wrestling shape,” Goodman said. “The wrestling shape I want to get in, it is like I am pretty much starting from zero when I come in from football. I start out a little behind, getting all the stupid stuff out of the way, like tripping over my feet coming out of my stance. And, because of the way I wrestle, conditioning is a key.
“I will get tired more quickly than most people, because I like to be aggressive. I can’t stand when people don’t do anything when they wrestle.”
Jordan explains the difference between playing football and wrestling this way: “In wrestling, you train to go hard for seven straight minutes with rests of about 30 seconds to a minute. In football, it is just the opposite, because you train to go all out for 15 to 30 seconds and have several minutes at rest in between. So you have to build up a certain kind of stamina to wrestle all-out like Ryan does, and you can’t have that immediately when you finish football.”
But Jordan believes Goodman, who was ranked No. 1 in the nation in wrestling at Absegami High School, has the ability and drive to join NC State’s roster of national champions, which includes heavyweights Tab Thacker (1984) and Sylvester Terkay (1993), 150-pounder Scott Turner (1988) and 167-pounder Matt Reiss (1980).
“Foreseeing outside anything out of our control, Ryan can be as good as he wants to be,” Jordan said. “He is bigger, stronger, a year more mature than last year. His technique has gotten better. I can’t wait to see him at the national tournament.”
Goodman is confident as well.
“I do think I am good enough to win a national championship,” he said. “I better be. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be wrestling.”
Goodman also has a little additional help this year. His older brother, Randy, joined the Wolfpack in the fall, despite being out of wrestling for three years after high school. He’s been the starter for much of the season at 174 pounds.
“We haven’t wrestled on the same team since my freshman year of high school, so it’s a little different,” Goodman said. “He still has some catching up to do on the mats, but we are having a good time, even if we are a little competitive with each other.
“My friends come over to our apartment sometimes just to watch us argue.”
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
