By Brian Reinhardt
USA Wrestling

For the 2026-27 collegiate season, there are six new head coaches in D1 men’s wrestling. Today we meet Rider’s Nic Bedelyon; Air Force’s Joe Johnston, who was the Kansas winner of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame's Dave Schultz High School Excellence Award in 2001; and The Citadel’s Tim McCall.

Part two will introduce you to Lehigh’s Brad Dillon; Iowa State’s Brent Metcalf, who was the Michigan and Midwest Region winner of the DSHSEA in 2005; and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s (SIUE) Daryl Thomas.

Question: As a first-year head coach, what is your personal excitement level as the season is about to get underway? 

Nic Bedelyon (Rider): This is actually my 15th year at Rider, so I came right out of Kent State. This is a dream; a goal of mine was always to be a head coach. This was 15 years in the making. I'm really excited. We have got a very young team, and guys are full of energy. For me, being the first-year head coach, it's just been a lot of fun. Like I tell my guys, they're living the dream. I'm living the dream also. I get to do what I do every day and it's been a blast.

Joe Johnston (Air Force): I'm really excited just because it's part of who I am and I love the sport. I think that's where my excitement stems. I think the excitement for the role is a little more even keeled because when I got the job, I immediately just felt the weight of the responsibility of it. My mission is kind of very wrapped up in wanting to make this great. I was doing that already as the head assistant coach and had a great relationship with our previous head coach, Coach Sam Barber. To take it over, it's been awesome and I'm embracing it. There's a weight to it and that's real. So, I think it's great, and I'm pumped. I'll be even more pumped when we start competing and we put our work on display.

Tim McCall (The Citadel): There's a lot of seeing what you can do, what you're capable of. I realize that I've been ambitious with some of the things that I'm trying to achieve right away. But I'm always reminded that Rome wasn't built overnight. But the thing that I'm excited about is, The Citadel is the furthest south D1 program. And I'm excited about making The Citadel the place to be on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I'm excited about getting the community excited about what we have going on. I want to be able to engage with fans, alumni, and be able to build this thing from the bottom up.

Question: Of the six new head coaches, five were promoted from within their program meaning McCall was the lone hire from the outside. What made The Citadel the job for you this offseason? 

McCall: Obviously, I was at Utah Valley before, and I loved it out there. I love Adam Hall. I love the family environment we created. But when The Citadel job came up, the thought of having a balance between military and wrestling, in my eyes, was a no-brainer. So, everything that the military stands for, I would say wrestling stands for too. Wrestlers and soldiers, we’re alike in the same way that we're normally preparing our bodies to run into the fight, not run away from the fight. And so that opportunity, it was a no-brainer for me. Also, to be at a place that is close to home, the connections that I have along the East Coast, especially in the North Carolina and South Carolina area. It just seemed right, like this is a place where you can make home that's not far from home. And you get the people around you that you grew up with to support you.

Question: Do you have any specific advice that you’ve received that you hold close to you as you're making this transition? 

Bedelyon: I've been surrounded by great people. I can't thank (former Rider head coach) John Hangey enough. He's done so much for me. I can't thank him nearly enough. I tell people all the time, if I got to coach with Coach Hangey and be an assistant for the rest of my career versus being a head coach, I would pick to coach with Hangey every day. I call him all the time, and I'm just used to seeing him every day. It's awesome to have him. I'm asking him four or five questions a day. Hangey, what do we got to do here? What do I do about this? And he gets back to me, and he's a big support of our guys, obviously.

Johnston: I'm so glad that (former head coach) Sam Barber is still around; he's just down the hallway. He's one of our own; I'd say he's kind of one of our mid-level administrators, and his job is really to help coaches a lot of times, help our cadet leadership, like our captains, but he's big time in helping coaches do things better. So, it's a very natural kind of progression where it's like he's still my mentor and he still helps me every week with stuff. I'm so excited for him that he got that opportunity and that it allowed me to be doing this. This is only my third place that I've ever worked, and I've been blessed in that. One of the main things I learned was when your athletes trust you to do things the right way, then you can coach them a little harder and you can be hard on them in the right moments and then understand where they're coming from.

McCall: I've had so many people that I look up to, obviously coming from NC State. We have a bunch of assistant coaches from my time that are now head coaches. So, constantly picking the brains of those around me. But I think one of the bigger ones right now is just, Rome wasn't built overnight. You're essentially in year zero, not even year one yet. By trying to move quickly, realize that you can't do it all. Start small and build.

Question: Both Air Force and The Citadel are different than a typical college environment. For somebody that doesn't know what your athletes go through off the mat daily, can you describe what being a student-athlete involves? 

Johnston: What I would say is we talk about a lot is that it's very structured, but it's not necessarily restrictive. Nobody's telling you what to do all the time. Your day is just broken up into the three main areas that the leadership at the academy has, which is obviously you have the military leadership side of things. You have the academics, which is the biggest piece of what you do here. And then you have athletics and PE time. So, everybody's day is structured like that, where they're going to have those three time blocks. Then they're going to have personal time, and that's usually at the end of the day. We want to honor their time, we know they have a lot of stuff going on. They can go off base usually when they want to go off base to get some food or something if it fits into that that personal time of their day. So, it's not as restrictive as you would think.

McCall: I would start out with these guys are waking up pretty early, it can be anywhere from 5:30 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. They'll have formation in the morning and after formation they're looking to get breakfast before heading to class. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have workouts at 11 a.m., so normally they'll get one to two classes in, head to practice, then get some more food in before heading to another class. They have a lift and then they have evening formation. It's a pretty packed schedule. The cool thing too about The Citadel is your study hall hours are implemented into your schedule every day. Then going to sleep and doing all over again.

Question: What are the strengths of this year’s team? 

Bedelyon: We have two great leaders that have returned, and they have both been to the NCAA tournament with Brock Zurawski (197 pounds) and Dylan Layton (149). They've both been there. It's good to have those guys in our room every day pushing the others, they've been prepared at the highest level. They've been in the biggest matches and they're our leaders. There might be a dual this year where we could have four or five first-year guys in our lineup. That's how young we are. But the good thing about that is they bring energy. They're fresh, they're excited. So those are strengths too, where guys are just eager to compete. And that's what we love, guys that want to compete, they're not worried about the results. They're just hungry to get out there.

Johnston: That's a tricky question to answer, honestly. I'd say we're a little bit of a mix of traditional hard-nose, gung-ho wrestling, but then we have some guys that do some unorthodox stuff. I think you know my attitude towards helping guys be their best is just literally that don't box guys in, don't make them have to wrestle a certain way, let their best wrestling come out.

McCall: The one thing that I love about these young men is they're going to bust their butts at anything that they do. They work hard. The way I've explained it to people is like I have a group of guys that will run through a wall. Anything you ask them to do, they'll do it. If you're looking for hard workers, that's what they're about. They take pride in that, they're not afraid of that. I'm excited for those guys to go out and push the wall back. In our room right now we talk about how deep the waters are and if you tend to take yourself to deep waters often while you're training it's going to be normal whenever you get out there and compete. And at that point, you're going to see who can swim and who can sink. So, we're working on that ability to think outside the box. I think our guys are going to go hard when they get the opportunity or when given the opportunity. I'm excited to see them get after it.

Question: Rider won a MAC title last year and had good results at the NCAAs. What are the keys to keeping the momentum going?

Bedelyon: What's been happening at Rider is special. Four years in a row now with an All-American. There's Big Ten programs that haven't had All-American in years. It's the resources we have compared to them. We're a very, very small private school that wrestles a great schedule. We test our guys all the time. We're not afraid of this team, that team. I think last year we had seven or eight teams in the top 25 on our schedule. And it's similar this year. The things that are happening at Rider are overlooked. They're overlooked by the big programs. And the good thing is that doesn't bother us. We just keep doing our thing. What we do very well is we just stay consistent with what we do.

Question: Air Force posted its third top 25 finish at the NCAA Championships in the last four years. What are the keys to keeping the momentum going?

Johnston: We must continue to crush it in a lot of areas. Those kinds of things don't just happen, and they must fit together in a certain way. Our team culture is number one. We must continue to be positive. Like I said, there's a lot of demands on our guys, and we must be able to show up and be intentional and be positive every day so that we can continue to do it. We can be consistent with our effort and our attitude and all the little things that are going to push us forward. I think we must continue to get our guys the right opportunities on the mat. I think the last thing is just we must continue to recruit top guys. We have some amazing, amazing recruits coming in this year. I think we're going to have, if not a top 20 class, a top 15 or 10 recruiting class. So, we're crushing in a lot of different areas. And I'm very grateful to the rest of our staff because they're putting in a ton of work in a lot of those things with the traveling and the schedule and recruiting.