PJ Duke struggled with the idea of Cael Sanderson coming to his house and eating dinner with his family. The first few days of in-home visits had been a whirlwind for the 17-year-old, who is one of the top wrestling recruits in the country.
“It’s a little weird how the first time you’re meeting some of these coaches in person is them just knocking at your door,” Duke said. “My parents were a little skeptical about everyone.”
Coaches from Iowa and Ohio State had already spent two hours each dining with Duke and his family. Everyone had their pitch as they flocked to New York to try to convince Duke that they needed him.
Duke is no stranger to being the center of attention on the mat. Last year during a wrestling tournament in Florida, the referees stopped everyone else’s match when it was Duke’s turn. Even the officials wanted to watch him. When one wins a high school state title at 13 years old, attention is inevitable.
Still, nothing prepares any wrestling-obsessed person, let alone a teenager, for the moment when Sanderson, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time and coach of the Penn State wrestling dynasty, is coming to their home to recruit them.
“My mom was like, ‘We’ve gotta make a good dinner and clean the house a little bit,’” said Will Henckel, a fellow Class of 2025 prospect who is committed to Penn State. “I was kind of just thinking, like, what am I gonna say?”
Duke, like his peers, only knows Penn State wrestling with Sanderson at the helm. He was there in the stands in Madison Square Garden in 2016 when the Nittany Lions won the NCAA championship. This next wave of Penn State wrestlers trying to extend the dynasty was too young to have witnessed Sanderson’s unblemished collegiate career at Iowa State, which concluded in 2002. They weren’t born by the time he won Olympic gold in Greece in 2004, either.
But they’ve watched and studied him on YouTube, in awe of his patented ankle pick and curious like everyone else how one achieves the highest level of success as an athlete and then somehow one-ups himself as a coach.
“Everyone in wrestling knows if you want to win you go to Penn State,” Duke said. “They almost have a monopoly on wrestling in the U.S.”
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