The Young and the Wrestlers

The wrestling program reemerges after fifty years and captures a championship.

The rebirth of Saint Vincent College wrestling became official in March 2022, when school officials reignited the varsity program after a fifty-year hiatus. Yet, it wasn’t until one morning in October 2023—more than a year after coach Dominick Nania was hired and began piecing together his inaugural roster—that the whole thing became real. “The day when we rolled out the mats in the workout room for the first time, it started to feel like we were legit,” Nania said.

Another landmark moment happened a couple of weeks later, when the Bearcats opened their season at the Adrian College Invitational in Michigan. “That was the first time I saw the guys wrestling in their singlets,” Nania said. “When I see them pound their chest and it says ‘Saint Vincent’ there, that means a lot. They’re proud of it, too, because they’re building this program.”

Wrestling is Saint Vincent’s twenty-fourth varsity sport and competes in NCAA Division III. From 1963 to 1975, SVC wrestled at the NAIA level. When interest waned, the program was downgraded to a club sport for a few years before finally vanishing from campus. Tom Harbert, who coached SVC’s wrestling team from 1963 to 1971, began lobbying about ten years ago to reboot the program.

“I’ve had a good ride with this sport,” said Harbert, a member of the Saint Vincent College Athletic Hall of Fame and the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. “Wrestling gave me an education; it led me to different people and to different jobs. It’s been a long ride, but also a good one. And I am so happy that it’s come back to Saint Vincent.”

Harbert had a lot of help getting wrestling reinstated. Alumni such as Domenick Valore, C’75, and John Lally, C’77, a member of the Saint Vincent College Board of Directors, made persuasive arguments. Dr. Jeff Mallory, C’06, G’13, Saint Vincent’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, quickly saw the upside: “I was puzzled only by why we hadn’t thought about it [earlier].” Harbert wrote more than 200 letters to his former wrestlers, friends, and wrestling fans to raise money for mats and equipment. According to Mallory, the total came to more than $150,000. “And we have more [people] who are pleased with where we are and already have said they would like us to approach them again for more funding,” Mallory said.

By the summer of 2022, the program had its budget and a full coaching staff. The well-equipped Dolan Family Wrestling Facility in Saint Scholastica Hall was ready to go, using mats borrowed from Hempfield High School until the SVC customized mats arrived in October. The next step was crucial: recruiting wrestlers. Western Pennsylvania, and especially Westmoreland County, is an incubator for blue-chip high school and youth league wrestlers; in fact, many of the best Division I programs mine talent out of towns like Murrysville, Latrobe, Greensburg, Connellsville, Waynesburg, and Kittanning.

A decade ago, Nania was the first-ever wrestling commit for a new program at Wheeling Jesuit (now called Wheeling University), so he understands the grind of the recruiting process. After coaching as an assistant for a total of six years at Seton Hill University and Hempfield and Norwin high schools, he knows what type of wrestlers will fit in at Saint Vincent. “You have to find not only the right athlete, but the right student-athlete,” Nania said. “We have lots of tiny hometown kids and small-school kids here. It’s stereotypical for someone to say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to live in some small town forever,’ but some of our guys actually do want to go back to their hometown and stay there forever—that’s wrestling.”

Nineteen of Saint Vincent’s twenty-one wrestlers are either freshmen or sophomores. Nania isn’t keen on the quick-fix of luring a lot of student-athletes from the transfer portal because he wants to build around guys who will be at Saint Vincent for four years. “I think our culture will stay strong that way,” Nania said.