By my estimation, Lonnie Morris would have been successful no matter what he chose to do in life. Luckily for Johnson and Wales University chose to be the Wildcats’ wrestling coach. In fact, after 22 years, Coach Morris cannot afford to keep buying his Pilgrim League Coach of the Year trophies—he’s won it eight times now. The solution? He has a new placard made and replaces the outdated one on the same trophy. At 25 years old, leaving his assistant coaching position at his alma mater, Coventry High School, and taking a 25 percent pay decrease to forge his own path, he founded the JWU Wrestling program. 

“I always knew that with Coach [at Coventry High School] being so legendary, you know, I was always going to be in his shadow. I could only do worse, and if I had success it would just be because it was the program I inherited. It would never be my own.” 

Forgoing $1,000 at age 25 is not by any means a safe choice, but it shows the self-reliance and confidence that have served him well over his career at JWU. In that time span, Coach Morris has accumulated 12 Pilgrim League championships (2000, 2002, 2005-2013, 2017, 2018), as well as 28 All-Americans, most recently capped off by back-to-back national titles from senior Jay Albis, who defined the program as, “a winning culture with a huge family mentality.”

    If Coach Morris was concerned about inheriting too successful of a program at Coventry, he didn’t have to worry about that at JWU. Wildcats’ Wrestling did not exist until Morris started the program. In his first year, he began with 12 wrestlers, two thirds of which had quit by season’s end. In hindsight, he thinks he pushed them too hard. “Looking back, yeah that was probably one mistake I made my first year. I pushed those guys so damn hard, too hard really. I probably could’ve backed off a bit more than I did, but I just wanted to work. But definitely something, looking back now, I should’ve done differently,” he said, his eyes darting up and to the right, clearly envisioning that first year of coaching. While he may call overworking those first dozen a mistake, a 33% retention rate is high compared to most incoming classes for the team. Morris said that if he is able to keep 20% of an individual freshman class through all four years of school, that is excellent. A wrestling team, by the sport’s nature, is built to be hierarchical. There are many weight classes and wrestlers only compete against similarly built opponents. It is a one-on-one battle—free of subjective calls from a referee, unpredictable playing surfaces, and dependence on teammates for success. As a result, it is very easy to see exactly how one wrestler stacks up against another. In football, if two quarterbacks are competing for the starting job on a team, their coach has many variables to account for when deciding who is better. A quarterback’s success is dependent on more than just his own ability— the talent of his receivers and offensive linemen, the judgement of the officials, the conditions of the field, the play calling of the coaching staff, and the other team’s defense. There is not so much grey area when evaluating wrestlers.

    Unlike the two quarterbacks, wrestlers compete directly against each other. If an upperclassman is consistently losing in practice to a first-year wrestler, it is very difficult for him to make a case to the coaching staff that he should still be competing in meets instead of his practice counterpart. Similarly, if the freshman is consistently losing, he may feel as though he will never be able to overcome his deficiencies. This makes quitting the most accessible option, especially when you are going through grueling practices day after day. However, for Coach Morris this kind of natural selection weeds out the wrestlers who do not have the competitive drive and commitment he is looking for in his athletes. He may only keep a fifth of his recruits, but they will be the ones best-prepared and hungriest for battle.

    However, as class size shrinks by 80% (optimistically) over four years, recruiting, as one could only logically conclude, becomes a key cog in the machine that is JWU Wrestling. “Right now, 2019, my budget for recruiting stands at around $3,800. My first year? Blew over five grand. And that was 22 years ago. Recruiting is what it’s all about,” Coach Morris told me. He is a firm believer in himself but he is not naive to the fact that the best teams have the best athletes. And even the best athletes need to be pushed. Pressure to improve from the coaching staff can only be so effective, but if a wrestler is worried about losing his number one spot to a teammate in practice, that will keep him motivated to improve every day. That phenomenon is only possible if many good wrestlers come to the school every year.

    As for the wrestlers who do find fault in the depth chart, blaming the coaching staff’s judgment or other external factors before themselves, Coach Morris likes to have some ammunition at the end of the season. Putting the Google Charts program to good use, he sends out end-of-year self-evaluations to his team, and just as the players are asked to assess the coaching staff for the athletics department, Coach Morris asks them to grade themselves for his benefit. Showing me the results in bar graph form on his desktop (an example of which you can find below), he said the most telling questions are the handful that ask about the qualities his players see in one another, including the player who was least “bought in” to the program, or displayed characteristics unacceptable on a team such as selfishness, laziness, and a negative attitude. The results are open for every team member to see, but only Coach Morris can see who submitted specific answers, keeping them anonymous to the players. When he showed me the results from this year’s evals, one wrestler in particular received almost all of the “bad teammate votes” for lack of a better term. “Yes, 100 percent [I’ve seen the benefits to the end-of-year questionnaire]. It brings light to your eyes,” Albis said. It’s quite cutthroat to be called out by your peers and have that used to rebut your claims against the coaching staff, but it speaks to the accountability that courses through the veins of JWU Wrestling’s culture. A national champion like Albis appreciates that in his team because he relies on his own teammates to prepare him for national contention.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Competitiveness in all endeavors is another characteristic ingrained in JWU Wrestling. One has to look no further than the team’s various social media accounts for proof (which, yes, I have conveniently linked at the bottom of the page). Their motto #WINatEVERYTHING follows each and every post. Albis told me if there was one thing he will carry with him forever, it would be that mantra, “‘Win at everything’ isn’t just for wrestling. It’s for life.” In fact, they take that adage so seriously that they have been awarded the Best in Brand Gold Standard Award the last two years for excellence in team branding and social media presence. This team has won at everything and plans to continue doing so.

    The program started from scratch has grown from rolling their own mats onto the Delaney Gymnasium floor every day to one of the most respected Division 3 teams in the country, a perennial regional champion and national contender. Self-reliance, accountability, competitiveness. These are the traits instilled in JWU Wrestling and will inevitably force Coach Morris to keep having to update his trophy’s date and the school to add banners to the Wildcat Center ceiling.