Teasdale ready to roar at Penn State

JEFFERSON, Pa. — Nothing excites Gavin Teasdale quite like the thought of wrestling in front of 6,000 or so screaming fans inside Rec Hall. Venues and moments like that are exactly why he's pushed his body to its limits for the better part of the past decade.

The thought of living and going to school at Penn State with 45,000 or so other undergrads, well, that's a little more daunting.

You have to understand Teasdale is a recent graduate of Jefferson-Morgan, a tiny high school located in rural Greene County in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania that also famously produced Cary Kolat three decades earlier. Enrollment at Jefferson-Morgan is just over 800 students -- and that's for grades K-12.

"It's going to be cool going up there," Teasdale was telling DKPittsburghSports.com the other day while driving back from an orientation day with 1,500 other of his fellow incoming freshmen. "Definitely not what I'm used to."

On the mat, however, Teasdale is used to winning. And that shouldn't change at the college level.

Teasdale is a top prospect, a four-time Pennsylvania state champion, one of just 13 — including Kolat — in the tournament's 80-year history and he heads to a program that has won seven of the last eight national championships. Sounds like a pretty good fit, eh?

Actually, Penn State wasn't his original choice. As a 16-year-old Teasdale committed to Iowa along with training partner Spencer Lee, only to have a change of heart a year later, opting to go to Cael Sanderson's juggernaut in State College. While Lee, a No. 1 recruit and a Franklin Regional product, went on to win the national championship at 125 pounds this year for the Hawkeyes, Teasdale is eager to write his own legacy with the Nittany Lions.

But if he wrestles as a true freshman — at either the 125 or 133 weight class, a source of much speculation — it will ultimately be Sanderson's call. The perennial powerhouse Nittany Lions have a number of solid wrestlers returning throughout its lineup.

Teasdale wrestled last year at 126 for Jefferson-Morgan, going 40-2 — his only two losses in high school — and finished with a career record of 162-2.

"If I had worked harder, I know I could have won," he says. "Those are losses lost at the end of the day, but I know if I could have trained like I normally would, those losses wouldn't have been there. It's going to be all good."

If he sounds unfazed, it's because he is. Teasdale is remarkably confident in himself and his ability and has all the trophies to prove it. He's even eyeing a career in MMA post-college. But for now, he has a few things he'd like to accomplish first: Things like an Olympic team and, of course, another national championship for Penn State. The speed and strength required to compete at the next level is just another challenge that he embraces.

"It's not as much of a difference as people put it out to be," he said. "You just have to go out there and wrestle. It's no different than high school wrestling. You just have to go out with the mindset of 'I'm going to compete at my style and not worry about other people.'  I'm going to go in with the same mentality as I had my freshman year of high school. Just going out there and wrestling. Not even worrying about 6,000 fans. When you're out there on the mat, it's just you out there."

And that's the way Teasdale likes it. After trying his hand at other sports as a youngster, he didn't take up wrestling until he was 10, but it's been a full-time commitment for him and his family since.

Club wrestling alone has already taken Teasdale all over the country and even to Slovakia, Bosnia and Cuba. He works out at Young Guns, a club located 100 miles away in Ebensburg, Pa., where he trained with Lee, among others. Obviously, some long drives were involved.

"I was like a zombie," said Gavin's father, Brandon, a former wrestler. "We'd come home during the year, he'd go to his high school practice, come home, right back out the door to his club practice. We'd get home 11-12:30, we'd got to the gym that was 24-hour access or do workouts in the living room with kettle bells. On the weekend, we'd find camps or run hills."

Gavin Teasdale is still deciding on a major and, like a couple other thousand kids, preparing to experience college life. Mostly though, he is looking forward to getting to work with his new teammates beginning later this month when he begins training at Penn State.

"It's going to be a good practice room once we're all in there, training with each other and getting each other better," he said.