Gone, Lost & Forgotten: Their Best = Texas El Paso

Sometimes wrestling can be wrestling's own worst enemy and from what I have been able to gather, allegedly that is the case with the University of Texas El Paso's wrestling program.

The idea of a Division I athletic director wanting to field a wrestling program from scratch is downright foreign. In our sport, it just doesn't happen.  Add in the fact that the school is in the most southern part of Texas & that the athletic director is a football & basketball coach it makes the story outright non-believable. 

Yet, from what I've been able to gather that's exactly what happened.   Athletic director George McCarty, who was known for breaking the color barrier by playing UTEP's first African American in basketball, wanted the Miners to have wrestling.

His first course of action was hiring Bruno Rolack as the head coach.   Wanting to be competitive from the get go, Rolack went to good friend Henry Pillard who was the head coach of Joliet Community College in Illinois.  Wanting his wrestlers to go on to get bachelors degrees, Pillard sent them to wrestle for Rolack at UTEP.

In the miners first year of wrestling 1968-1969, two former Joliet wrestlers Al Handy & Larry Wollschlager won Western Athletic Conference titles.  They would repeat again in 1970, along with another former Joliet wrestler Bill Bell.

Unfortunately, from what I've been able to gather McCarty and Rolack had difficulty getting anyone to come to El Paso for home duals.  Oklahoma & Oklahoma State weren't thrilled about making the over 700 mile trip and no one else was closer.  The inability to host home meets, the budget to travel and the difficulty to recruit outside of the Joliet Pipeline lead McCarty to call it quits. Bill Bell had to finish up his senior year of wrestling at the University of Arizona.

 It's a sad state of affairs that with so many schools so eager to drop wrestling, act as if they never had a program at all (Did you read my article on the best wrestlers from Texas A&M?) that the one time we had a school, in the south that wanted wrestling, we were part of the reason it wasn't able to work out.  I'm happy that Arkansas-Little Rock's experience has been more pleasant. 

Larry Wollschlager

As mentioned above Larry Wollschlager is one of the best UTEP ever had in wrestling.  A two time WAC champ in 1969 and 1970, what's even cooler about Wollschlager is his history with Joliet wrestling.  Joliet dropped their wrestling program after the 1984-1985 season.  Because of the efforts of Wollschlager and others, Joliet reinstated wrestling a few years ago.

How cool it'd be if one day UTEP did the same!