tle’ more than anything. I liked the way Gable did things. We went in there and wrestled an hour-and-a-half live every day. There was not a lot of slowing down in the afternoon for learn- ing. We just would go. We did our learning in the mornings. I liked the idea of getting in there, with one guy trying to kill the other guy for an hour and a half. You do a few sprints and you were done. That was the formula.
USA Wrestler: Your senior year, Iowa had five individual champions and set a record for team points at the NCAAs. What was it like to be on such a powerful team? Dresser: If I told you all the stories, they’d have to kill me. I can’t tell you them all. It was a work hard, play hard group of guys, and the work hard part was first. It was a fun time to be there. We never worried about the team title ever. Gable might have worried a little in ’86 because we only qualified eight guys, but of the eight guys, six were in the finals and the other two got fourth or fifth. We had eight guys place in the top five. I’m brag- ging a bit, but we still hold the record for the largest margin of victory. I never stressed about winning the team title. In the five years I was there, the tournament was over on Saturday morn- ing, already clinched.
USA Wrestler: What were your personal goals after college, and how did you end up pursuing coaching as a career? Dresser: Unfortunately, my academic goals were being an
NCAA champion in wrestling. You could tell my academic goals didn’t have much focus to them. I’m being brutally honest. I did- n’t go there with much academic thought in the process. I went there to wrestle. I didn’t look past the NCAA Championships in 1986. I couldn’t get past that. I am a narrow-minded guy. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I got done and achieved what I want- ed to achieve. I probably walked around in a fog for a year, competed a little bit, wasn’t making any money. I was living off that title, doing camps and getting paid to teach wrestling across the United States. I got a phone call from Grundy, Va. and it got me some focus back. Then all of a sudden, I got around kids and got around coaching, I developed that same passion as I did as an athlete.
USA Wrestler: How did you end up Grundy, Va., and what was it like working with young people from such a remote place? Dresser: They hired me as a full-time wrestling coach and
paid me a lot of money to do it. I think they realized it was a hard place to live. But great people, some of the greatest peo- ple I have been around. Here I moved from Iowa City, which had 30,000 kids my age, to Grundy, with a total population of 1,800. When I got the job opportunity, back then when you wanted to know where a town is, you had to go buy a map. I had a fold-out map and kept looking and couldn’t find Grundy anywhere. It was so small, it wasn’t on the map. I flew in for an interview, and I saw the passion there. They had already won a couple of state titles, every kid in town was out for youth league wrestling. It was a wrestling-oriented community, they had a huge budget. They had the resources to get those remote coal- mining kids out of there and get them opportunities. They were just a tough bunch of kids. I trained them hard. I probably trained them too hard my first few years.
USA Wrestler: Your Grundy teams ran off eight straight state titles in your division. Tell us about that winning culture. Dresser: I wasn’t a real good coach those first few years. I was living off their fumes of what they did before. Grundy taught me a lot about coaching and a lot about building a program. They had things in place. By my fourth year, we could say we
were good in Virginia but that was not saying a lot. We were winning here, but at the national events, we weren’t winning. I made a focus on that, and the last three years we won a lot nationally. I had to coach better, develop kids, get them into national competition and get them to win. We did that. It was satisfying to take the program to another level. The last few years, we had seven or eight state champs and 12 in the finals. More importantly, we were ranked in the top 20 in the nation in all schools, all classes. We were beating the Nazareth, Pa.’s of the world. That was the goal at that point.
USA Wrestler: You went on to Christiansburg High School in
Virginia. How was that program different than at Grundy, and what had to happen for your athletes to excel there? Dresser: When I got to Grundy, a 25-year-old single guy, it
didn’t take long to figure out that there wasn’t much flying there. In the off-season I moved to Blacksburg, about two hours away, the closest place that had kids my age. I started socializing. The wrestling coach at the time, Jerry Cheynet, invited me to run the fall program, because he was the soccer coach also. In the early 90’s, I ran the fall program at Virginia Tech. I left Grundy in 1996, thinking I was bored, ready to get out of wrestling. There wasn’t a challenge left for me. I thought I was ready to put on a suit and tie. I got my broker’s license and insurance certificate, and got into financial services. I moved back to Des Moines, worked in an office for four or five months. I had just been mar- ried. I went home, told my wife that this stinks, I don’t like wear- ing a tie, I miss wrestling, I want to go back to Virginia and start over. My job at Grundy was gone. I went to Christiansburg. It was near Blacksburg. My wife is from the area. They were get- ting ready to drop the program. They had about 14 kids out for wrestling, no middle school, no youth. It was a challenge. I start- ed from scratch. I took everything I learned at Iowa and Grundy, got the ball rolling and we got really good at the end.
USA Wrestler: In 2006, you changed levels by accepting the head coaching job at Virginia Tech. Why did you embrace that opportunity, and what did you discover about the program? Dresser: Like ’96, in ’06 I was starting to get bored. We were really dominating our last few years at Christiansburg. Nationally, we were top 5 in the nation a few times. I started a real estate business on the side and thinking about putting more time into that. At that point, the Virginia Tech thing happened real fast. I thought it would be a cool challenge. I got in and they offered me the job without even an interview. I went over there, and they were kind of contemplating whether to keep wrestling or not. I gave the athletic director a pep talk, and he offered me the job. We had a lot of work to do once I said yes.
USA Wrestler: What were key things that helped you improve the team at Tech, and who were some of the athletes which made a difference in stepping up the performance? Dresser: I’m a big believer in getting the right kind of people behind you. Administratively, I felt I had the right people behind me here at Virginia Tech. Internally, hiring Tony Robie was a key hire for me. You are only as good as the people around you. I’ve always worked hard to surround myself with good people. Tony is a great asset. We did some research. The four wrestlers that come to mind are Jarrod Garnett, Peter Yates, Jesse Dong and David Marone. They came in, two of them All-Americaned and two didn’t. They won a lot of matches for us, and they set the tone in terms of culture. Marone and Dong were tremen- dously hard workers and great leaders. They never got to the podium but were close, round of 12 guys. Garnett and Yates got
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