Messiah was the national runner-up, finishing 29.5 points behind perennial Division III wrestling power Wartburg and 36 points ahead of third-place finisher Luther College, The Falcons earned six total All-Americans and crowned two national champions: Lucas Malmberg at 125 pounds and Ben Swarr at 174 pounds.
Bryan Brunk celebrates after a victory (Photo/Messiah College)I recently had the opportunity to sit down with coach Brunk and talk about Falcon wrestling, the success of the program, and what he believes makes Messiah a unique and special place for college wrestling.
We initially talked about how he came to Messiah and what made it the right fit for him as a head coach.
"For me, Messiah College is a round hole and I'm a round peg," said Brunk. "I think I'm a great coach here but I have no clue if I'm a great coach anywhere else. I know wrestling OK, I think, but my strength as a coach is in relationships. I disciple young men here through the sport of wrestling to be more like Jesus Christ. That's what I'm put on earth to do and here, with guys who know that's the mission of the place, it works. I can inspire them. I can lead them. I can mold them. And they respond to it. If I were someplace else, I'd have to find a different way to inspire and lead and mold, and maybe I could still do it, but I just know that this place is a round hole and I'm a round peg."
I asked Coach Brunk what he tells a high school wrestler considering coming to Messiah to wrestle.
"I have a whole spiel and it probably sounds somewhat canned because I say it a lot, but it's easy for me to sell Messiah," said Brunk. "Part of my job as a recruiter is to sell it, but it's easy for me because I really, really believe it. I think that Messiah is the best place to wrestle in the country. Now of course that doesn't mean we're the best team every year. We haven't won a national title yet in Division III, and certainly if we wrestled Penn State in a dual, they might edge us out [with a grin]. But we can't say that without first producing on the mat, so some of that is the athletic product that we're putting out there.
"We're producing All-Americans, and national champions, and teams with winning records, and conference and regional championship teams, and now two trophies at the national championship in the past three years. So to start with, we have to show that we have the ability to produce athletically and to develop our guys athletically. If a kid comes here, he knows that he has the chance to develop into one of those types of athletes."
He emphasized the focus on academics at the college as well but then elaborated on what he feels to be the distinguishing factor for Messiah wrestling.
"I just think we have the best team culture in the country. We're having so much fun as a team. I don't think enough college coaches talk about having fun. I mean, you come in with a recruit and you tell him how you're going to make him a national champ and how you're going to help him get good grades so that he can get a job after college. Everybody talks about those things. But these are the best years of your life. You've got so much fun as an 18-22 year old living on a campus full of 18-22 years-olds and at a place like Messiah where all these guys are mostly like-minded … You're never going to have that experience again. It's a fun time! And we want to make sure that the wrestling team contributes to that great, fun experience. There's a time for putting aside fun and working hard, but even there we try to find ways to have fun. There are weekends where I show up at a tournament with some weird beard because the guys won a competition like 'who got the most takedowns' at the last tournament and got to tell me how I had to shave my beard for the next tournament. We're having fun in those kinds of ways, where it doesn't take anything away from the hard work, but we're going to have fun and not take ourselves too seriously.
"And then finally, within the team culture is just a real spiritual focus. I am put on earth to disciple. That's what I am most gifted at. We do this through formal ways and informal ways, through the ways we talk about ourselves, about why we wrestle, how we're different than other programs, about what our identity is and what winning and losing mean to us. I think we're known as a team for how we love each other and for having a culture that's focused primarily on knowing Jesus Christ better and making Him known to other people."
Bryan Brunk was named Coach of the Year by the NWCA and D3Wrestle.com (Photo/Messiah College)"Any technique set that somebody runs can be aggressive and relentless, constantly trying to score points. We try to make sure that our guys are constantly attacking for a full seven minutes because you never want to be satisfied and let up. I think that's not just good wrestling technique, I think it's good character. When you've done enough and then you try to coast -- I mean that happens in life all the time too -- and that's not good character. When you tense up and try to hold onto something, you tend to make more mistakes or at least give someone else a chance to come back and take it from you."
"I think that coaching, more than anything else, is building relationships. The best coaches are the coaches that have somebody on the other end that would run through a brick wall for them."
Finally I pointed out that the gap between Messiah and Wartburg was smaller than the gap between Messiah and the third place team and asked what coach Brunk felt it would take to get to the top of the podium as a team.
"I think it is more of the same, and I also think it doesn't matter if it happens or not. People may hear that and take it the wrong way. If someone hears that and thinks, 'Well, they don't really want it,' then they don't know me. It's not that I don't care, but that it doesn't matter. If I become the coach of a national championship team, it's going to be gratifying and I'm going to be excited about it. I'm going to pump up that trophy and we're going to celebrate. But 15 years from now nobody's going to remember, and it won't matter. I asked my guys to do a lot of work on their identity so that they could go into the postseason specifically with it being OK if they win a national title and OK if they lose and don't reach All-American status. But only OK either way. And it's going to hurt if you don't reach your goals and that's OK. It's OK to hurt. And it's going to be exciting if you do, and that's OK. It's OK to be excited.
"But the baseline is that my identity and my value are already predetermined. I don't base my value or my identity on any of my wrestling or coaching accomplishments. I base it on who I am in Jesus Christ and as an off-shoot of that, I base it on the relationships I have around me because I know that they are an off-shoot of my relationship with Jesus Christ."
Coach Brunk speaks fondly of and with high praise for his assistant coaches and feels that they deserve much of the credit for the success of the program. All five of them are former wrestlers at Messiah during Brunk's tenure.
"I get really uncomfortable with the accolades, I really do," said Brunk. "I don't like it. I don't want that to be taken the wrong way either. I'm not ungrateful. I'm grateful for it. But in part it's because I know my assistant coaches won the Coach of the Year more than I did when I look at the amount of time each one of them put into our guys. These guys have done it. I'm just kind of facilitating it. That's where I find my sense of worth and value. I hope that is seen as a product of my true value only coming from Jesus and what He did for me and who I am in Him. I'm a child of the King. I'm forever forgiven. Those are the things that make me who I am, and I'll coach hard because of that."
I found Coach Brunk to be passionate about what he is doing with a love for his team, assistant coaches, and school that he could not hide. It is clear to me from my time spent with him and from the results his team is getting on the mat that he is the right man for the job and, as he says, a round peg for a round hole.
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