Wrestling: Former Panthers rooting for Stottlemyer to get first conference title

He speeds toward his office on a cool Friday night in Boone, N.C., thinking only of the… He speeds toward his office on a cool Friday night in Boone, N.C., thinking only of the wrestling match happening 400 miles away.

Pitt alumnus Alan Utter walked past the people painting his office hallway an off-white color, entered his office and unpacked his new 25-inch computer monitor. After clicking his way to pittsburghpanthers.com, he sat down to watch Pitt’s most important match of the year.

Yet again, the Panthers battled for a regular season Eastern Wrestling League championship, fighting to give their coach, Rande Stottlemyer, his first taste at the title in his 31st season at Pitt.

Stottlemyer has been here before, but the opportunity always seemed to slip away.

“You know how many times we had it in the grasp of our hands?” Stottlemyer asked. “We were down to heavyweight with West Virginia two or three times, with Edinboro three or four times. There wasn’t a whole lot that separated us.”

Utter said he hoped this night was different, and so did some of his former Pitt wrestling teammates.

Watching online from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., Lehigh wrestling coach Pat Santoro knew the first bout was the catalyst to a Pitt victory or loss on the night. The former NCAA national champion at Pitt under Stottlemyer, Santoro told Utter that the freshman matchup to kick off the match was the key.

“Pat had said early in the night that if we could win that bout, it was going to get Pitt off to a great start,” Utter said. “He was right.”

Pitt freshman Anthony Zanetta won the bout, setting up five straight wins for Pitt to open the match. Utter texted a score update to his friend and former teammate in Portland, Ore., Matt Rizzo, after Pitt won the second bout.

Rizzo was walking his three dogs outside and stopped to see the latest update. He finally called Utter.

“He was screaming and yelling about the freshman, mostly play-by-play things,” Rizzo said.

Santoro, Utter and Rizzo all wrestled at Pitt under Stottlemyer from 1986 to 1990. Santoro had the most success out of the three, winning back-to-back national titles in 1988 and 1989 at 142 pounds.

Santoro remembers Stottlemyer’s unrelenting care for his athletes.

“There were times when I was there in the springtime or over the summertime, and I’d run into him around 11 o’clock at night. He’d say, ‘Hey, you want to work out?’” Santoro said. “Sure enough, we’d go up and work out until midnight sometimes.”

Utter has a distinct memory of Stottlemyer.

Utter, who earned four degrees from Pitt — B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in exercise physiology and M.P.H. in epidemiology — said he attributes most of his academic success to Stottlemyer.

Now a full-time professor at Appalachian State University, Utter said he nearly failed out of Pitt and was placed on academic probation. But one day, Stottlemyer called him into his office.

“He brought me in and said, ‘Alan, if you want to continue to wrestle here, you’ve got to be a student first. You need to make a commitment to your academics and put the same effort into your academics as you’re doing with athletics,’” Utter said.

But Stottlemyer didn’t leave it at that.

“There were study halls and follow-up meetings,” Utter said. “I was on the verge of flunking out, but I was able to pull it around my junior and senior year, get my GPA up high enough to get into graduate school and then went on to get a Ph.D.”

It was time for Utter to cheer on his former coach from miles away.

He said he was yelling so much, the painters looked at him through the window on his door. Santoro said he was watching the match online, as well.

But the match took a turn for the worse.

“When the 174-pound guy got pinned, I thought, ‘Oh, great, not again,’” Rizzo said. “I started getting a little nervous, but I knew from following the team that we were strong in the last three weights. They’ve come close so many times, and I felt like maybe a New Orleans Saints fan, just wanting them to finish it off just this one time.”

Eventually and fittingly, the regular-season title came down to the heavyweight bout.

Pitt’s Ryan Tomei made sure Pitt was victorious, winning his bout 7-3 to give Pitt and Stottlemyer an EWL regular-season championship, thanks to a 21-13 win.

The win drew smiles from Pittsburgh to Portland.

“For me, growing up in Pittsburgh being a huge Steelers fan, it was just as good as the Steelers winning the Super Bowl,” Rizzo said.

It even featured a post-Super Bowl tradition.

“First of all, I had to dry off. They got me with the Gatorade bath, so that was good,” Stottlemyer said. “But seeing a lot of the people there who had followed us for a long time [and] obviously felt the same heartaches we felt when we lost it in that last gasp of the match — it was pretty neat.”

After that, it was a flurry of text messages, e-mails, phone calls and congratulatory handshakes.

“There were a lot of people, some guys, a guy by the name of Billy. I hadn’t heard from Billy in 20 years, and he sent me a text,” Stottlemyer said.

So far, Stottlemyer said he’s talked with Utter, Santoro and Rizzo.

“It’s nice when you build relationships with the guys, and they leave,” Stottlemyer said. “You try and keep it as good as you can, but it’s still pretty neat when they call back and say congratulations.”

At the end of the night, Rizzo received one final text from Santoro.

“We won!”

All three shared a moment with their former coach. It was one they couldn’t provide for themselves but felt just as much a part of it as anyone.

“It’s great for alumni to see what’s happening because I felt like I was there,” Utter said. “It was 20 years ago, and I felt like I was back in the Field House competing. It had that same kind of energy.”