Kyle Ruschell will admit that he’s “obsessed” with trying to get the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga wrestling program back to the standard it once had.
Since earning a share of the Southern Conference regular-season championship in 2019, the Mocs haven’t finished better than third in the regular season (when dual meet competition determines the standings) and have dipped to fourth in the past two seasons. During that stretch, they’ve also failed to finish better than third in the conference tournament, a traditional bracketed event.
It’s a dip from prior eras, such as when Heath Eslinger — the head coach Ruschell replaced in 2018 — led the program to a 53-5 mark in SoCon matches and won six regular-season and five conference tournaments from 2009-18. And it’s not as though SoCon success on the mat started with Eslinger for the Mocs.
UTC has a total of 17 SoCon regular-season championships and 29 league tournament titles in its history, and Ruschell want the Mocs to add more.
“I think about it constantly,” he said of getting the program back to that level. “If I relate it back to my college age of competing, it’s the same. It’s something that I think about every day, how can we get a little bit better in each position wrestling-wise, but also each weight class, and we’ve got to do whatever it takes because no one else is going to do it, nobody else is going to feel sorry for us.