It’s not unusual for longtime wrestlers to walk away from the sport.
The physical demands, the mental intensity needed, the battles with weight requirements, the aftermath of injuries -- more than one extremely promising wrestler has said goodbye to the sport after putting years into it.
But what is unusual is for those ex-wrestlers to return to the sport after their scholastic days.
Colin Crowell did just that -- and is loving it.
“I missed wrestling,” he said. “I missed the wrestling mentality of working hard to better yourself. I wanted to be the best athlete I could be.”
It makes sense that someone named Crowell might regret not wrestling; Colin is the son of legendary Nazareth coach Dave Crowell.
But missing the sport is one thing; deciding to come back to it is a whole different matter.
After stopping wrestling in 2013, Crowell has made a remarkable return to wrestling -- in college, at New England College in Henniker, N.H.
That’s almost unheard of. Wrestlers have stopped in junior high, and come back in high school, or even skipped a year or two in high school and returned.
But to not wrestle at all in high school and make a comeback -- in college? Years later?
Truly a rare event. In fact, it’s almost impossible to think of anybody else who has done so in recent memory.
The 2017 Easton graduate has come back to the mats, competing at 141 pounds, after never wrestling for the Red Rovers, or for Kutztown, which he attended for five semesters. He entered New England College, which competes in NCAA Division III, as a mid-year transfer in January and went 1-2 in competition.
“I had two weeks of practice before I competed at an open tournament at Johnson & Wales (in Providence, R.I.),” Crowell said. “I was pretty much dead after the first practice when I came back. But then I won my first match. I had two more matches, and I lost those; the kids were pretty good, they both qualified for Division III regionals. I felt like I was back where I needed to be, back where I was supposed to be.”
A long legacy in wrestling
It is a remarkable twist in a story that started, like many Lehigh Valley wrestling careers, when Crowell was tiny.
“I started wrestling when I was five,” he said. “I was born into wrestling. But it was never imperative that I wrestled. I never felt like I was expected to wrestle.”
Even so, by his ninth grade season at Easton, Crowell had had enough.
He was struggling with weight issues.
“I was trying to make 113 and that was hard for my body,” he said. “My hands were cramping up so badly I couldn’t open them up.”
Still, you get the idea that had the challenge just been physical, Crowell would have found a way to fight through it.
However, a key element was lacking.
“My heart wasn’t in it,” he said. “I wasn’t able to find the motivation I needed.”
It wasn’t as if Crowell wasn’t having success at wrestling; he took third in the District 11 junior high tournament in eighth grade. And many of his best friends, such as Evan Fidelibus and Hayden Keleher, were wrestlers.
But, as any wrestler will tell you, without the inner drive, the burning desire to compete, wrestling becomes impossible.
So Crowell made the choice to step away. Given his family -- his father, of course, and his older brother David had been a PIAA 3A runner-up as a Nazareth senior and was competing at Penn State -- it was no simple choice.
“It wasn’t an easy thing for me to do,” he said. “Wrestling’s a big deal in the Lehigh Valley and quitting it isn’t easier. My dad fully supported me. I think my mother took it harder.”
In retrospect, Crowell said, there was probably just one way he’d have stuck it out with wrestling.
“The only way I’d have wrestled was if I had transferred to Nazareth and wrestled for my dad, which is what people thought I would do (as his brother had),” Crowell said. “But I was happy at Easton, and I loved all the Easton traditions like the Easton-P’burg game.”
So Crowell switched to baseball, which he had played for years, and became an outfielder on some very good Red Rover teams, including the 2016 squad that won their first District 11 championship in 23 years.
“(Baseball) coaches Carm LeDuca and Greg Hess were two of the best coaches I have ever had,” Crowell said. “The way they treated me, I felt like I was their son.”
Thinking of a return
Crowell figured to put his athletic career aside when he went to Kutztown, which he enjoyed. But slowly the thought of wrestling came back, especially when his Easton friends Fidelibus, Keleher and Diego Santiago all wound up at New England College.
“It took a lot of convincing from all my friends; I wasn’t really sure I wanted to wrestle again at first,” he said. “It was a big process. My dad supported and guided me, but he put no pressure on me to return to wrestling.”
Crowell’s comeback was interrupted by a knee problem and a pulled hamstring, injuries that perhaps might be expected after so long away from the sport, and injuries that ended his season early.
But he’s not letting that setback bother him. He is majoring in secondary education and hopes to become a wrestling coach -- it seems to run in the family -- he’s at a perfect weight, he’s back with his friends, and he’s relishing every minute of being a wrestler again.
“I am extremely excited about my senior season (coming up),” he said. “I’ll have a full offseason to prepare and I’ll be in a lot better condition. I think I have a lot of unfinished business in wrestling, and I have something to prove to myself.”
Brad Wilson may be reached at bwilson@lehighvalleylive.com. If there’s anything about this story that needs attention, please email him. Follow him on Twitter @bradwsports. Find Lehigh Valley high school sports on Facebook.
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