Tuesday Q&A: Tossin’ 10 at Archie Randall, Oklahoma City University head coach for men and women

Photos of Archie Randall courtesy of Oklahoma City University.


Each Tuesday, TheMat.com will be tossing 10 questions at a college wrestling coach. This week, we visit with Oklahoma City’s head coach Archie Randall. The OCU men’s and women’s teams are top contenders for national team titles this season.

Question 1: OCU could win two college national wrestling titles in 2016, as the men are ranked No. 2 in the NAIA and the women are ranked No. 2 in the WCWA. Is that crazy talk or can your teams do it?
Randall: Both of them are ranked No. 2. It’s doable. You know how it works in wrestling. If we have a good day, barring injuries, barring eligibility, barring all those different things that could take you off your path. Both teams are wrestling well right now and I think we have an opportunity to win both. Our women’s team is a little inconsistent because they are kind of young. We beat the No. 1 team in a dual and beat the No. 2 team in a dual, but lost to the No. 5. They are young. I think it’s doable, and the athletes themselves think it’s doable. That’s the most important thing. They think they can accomplish the goal. That’s more than 90% of it, how they feel about it. It could happen. It would be pretty exciting if it did.

Question 2: What is the most challenging things about coaching men’s and women’s varsity college teams at the same time?
Randall: You have to be willing to put in hours and hours and hours. I put in six or seven hours a practice a day with both teams. You have to be able to turn the switch on and off. Mentally, girls are totally different than guys and visa versa. You have to be able to change your coaching style from one group to the next group. They are motivated by different things. Women are motivated differently than men are. You have to be able to turn the light switch on and off, and turn it on again. I have done it now for nine years and its challenging. There’s always something new that is going to happen. On the other hand, it is pretty exciting when you have an opportunity like we have right now. We have two really good solid teams, and two really good groups of solid kids, athletically, academically, the whole nine yards. Both teams have the package to do what they want to do.

Question 3: WCWA champion Cody Pfau is tall and lean for her weight, but has tremendous power. What makes her such a hammer?
Randall: It’s her tenacity. She goes into every match the same way, no matter who she wrestles. She goes in with the mindset that she is going to win, no matter who she wrestles. She goes 100% the whole time. Her intensity level is off the chart. Her pain tolerance level is off the chart. Her work ethic is outstanding. She is the hardest working girl in the room. She is focused on what she wants to do. She wants to get to the Olympics, she wants to be Olympic champion. She wants to be undefeated this year. She wants to be a national champion. She knows her goals. She won’t let anything stop her from getting to those goals.

Question 4: For those who don’t follow NAIA wrestling closely, who are your top men this year, and what makes them so tough?
Randall: My top three guys are my 157-pounder Zach Skates, who is a three-time All-American and ranked No. 1, my 165-pounder Ricky McCarty, the returning national champion who is ranked No. 1 and 184-pounder Derek Sivertsen, who is ranked No. 1 and an All-American last year. I’ve got four All-Americans returning and nine ranked right now. The team is still relatively young. Both teams are. The women’s team only has two seniors on it. The men’s team, we start three seniors. They are a pretty young group. Those three guys are the catalyst of the team. They perform very well every time they wrestle. I’ll have a couple kids coming in January who are eligible and will help us out. I have an All-American at 125, Adrian Gaines, who was an All-American at 133 and going down. My 141-pounder Parker Bohannan, who was a national qualifier at 141, is going down to 133. They are making these choices themselves to give us an opportunity to win.

Question 5: On the men’s side, you have Oklahoma State, Oklahoma and Central Oklahoma among the programs to recruit against. What are you looking for a high school wrestler from Oklahoma for your men’s team?
Randall: The first thing we look at is academics. It is tough here academically. The next thing we look at is style of wrestling. My kids wrestle a certain way. We are an attacking team. We attack on our feet and we attack from every position. Their placement, we want them to be a state finalist. We don’t have anybody on the team who is not a state finalist. It is important that they have some credentials behind them. With their style of wrestling, are they going to attack? Are they going to look to score? Those kind of kids do better in our program than the rest of them. Practice is pretty exciting because they beat the dog out of each other every day. It’s fun to watch.

Question 6: Both the NAIA and the WCWA keeps growing, with more teams every year. How much harder is it to win now than when you started at OCU?
Randall: The women’s programs have grown and grown and grown. The larger we get, and the more teams we get, the more spread out the better wrestlers are. That gives us a better opportunity to win. I recruit a certain kind of girl, too. I recruit someone who is willing to put out the effort to learn and put out the effort to win. The NAIA is growing. We have 55 teams right now. I think we are adding five or six next year. The women are at like 25, and I know four more teams coming in next year. Both of them, the growth creates a better atmosphere of competition. It makes it tougher to recruit. There are new programs popping up all over the place. At the end of the game, it makes it exciting for you because the national championship becomes worth something. If I win a national title in the women’s division with 30 teams, that is a greater title than when I won with five or six teams in it. You have to understand, the top end of the NAIA uses mostly D-I transfers. It becomes pretty intense in both events. I am glad they are not back-to-back. I get a couple weeks between each one, so it’s OK.

Question 7: You were a top high school coach before moving into the college coaching ranks, something you don’t see much anymore. Why should college ADs look a little closer at talented high school coaches when they have an opening?
Randall: I think they do. It’s a choice that you make. If you are a high school coach and you are aspiring to do one of these college jobs, it’s a total different type of game. Coaching in college is so different than high school in leaps and bounds. You have so many different issues you have to address. I don’t miss my high school days, but the college is a lot tougher. Recruiting is tougher. Budgets are tougher. You have different issues with the athletes that you didn’t have in high school. Fundraising is so critically important in every program. Recruiting the right kid to make sure the kid can make it in your program. This goes for both sides, men and women. There are several guys who have stepped out of the high school and done the college gig. They will tell you the same thing. It’s tough to be a college coach. It’s tough to be a college athlete. It’s tough to go through school, try to get a degree and be an athlete. It’s much easier just to go to school. You will find that happens a lot.

Question 8: You take pride when your former athletes, both men and women, become wrestling coaches. What is your philosophy on how to develop a coaching mindset in your wrestlers?
Randall: I do the same thing with both groups. When they become seniors and make that decision to become a coach, I try to involve them in my coaches meetings, to learn the strategies why we do this or don’t do this. I encourage them to become assistant coaches first. Be an assistant coach someplace, learn from somebody. You take something from every coach that you coach with. Eventually, you will formulate your own style, your own thought process. It’s everything you have done in the sport that will make you contribute as a coach. Coaching is low pay, many hours, lots of sacrifices, but it’s the most rewarding thing I have ever done in my life. We have four or five guys coaching high school right now, two or three girls coaching college right now. It’s a life choice. Choosing the life of being a coach is kind of tough.

Question 9: Outside of coaching, you have been involved in running major tournaments for men and women at many age levels. What are key ingredients in building successful events?
Randall: The first thing you have to do is surround yourself with people who have experience in the different areas of the event itself. There’s all kinds of facets to running an event. You got to have the key people who can do whatever is needed, whether it’s setting the mats up, setting the clocks up, running the tournament. It’s all about being well organized. The other thing is having man power to run the tournament. Fortunately, here at OCU, we have pretty good volunteer help, and both my teams work the tournaments. You have to plan way ahead. Anytime we have an event, we will plan at least 4-6 months in advance. When it gets close, we start meeting on a regular basis to make sure all of our bases are covered. If you do that, you will have a successful event, and you will have the luxury of more people coming to it, time after time. It keeps growing. Eventually, the events become a fundraiser for you program, so we have the money to do the things we want to do.

Question 10: Regardless of level, high school or college, man or woman, who was the best wrestler you’ve coached and why, and who else should be in that discussion?
Randall: At every single level, there is someone you have coached who you regard as one of the top wrestlers. In high school, the best wrestler I coached was Tyrone Lewis. He was hard-working, dedicated, devoted to the sport, did what he was supposed to do academically. He was a great kid. Tenacious, talented. He had the whole package. What I am talking about in women’s wrestling, it would probably be Michaela Hutchison, the same type of individual. When you are coaching kids, the same type of individuals emerge that you feel will be the most successful. They are hard working. They are physically tough. They have goals. They have goals academically, as well as athletically. Everything they do in life is goal-oriented. With my men’s team right now, the toughest kid I have coached over the years is Zach Skates. Even though Ricky McCarty is national champion and he will probably be the best kid I will coach. At this point in my career, Zach is the hardest working I have had in my program ever. He’s a three-time All-American and hasn’t quite gotten that national championship yet, but he doesn’t stop working at getting that goal. Ricky McCarty is only a junior. When it’s all said and done, he will be one of the top kids too.

Past Tossin’ 10 interviews
November 10 - Stanford head coach Jason Borrelli 
November 3 - Pennsylvania head coach Alex Tirapelle 
October 27- South Dakota State head coach Chris Bono