Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009 - (Page 14)

wrestling • women’s soccer SPORTS wrestling PUTTING FEET TO HIS DREAMS Pat Santoro was in middle school when his mother, like all moms do, asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. Instead of the answers that most boys that age normally give (i.e., astronaut, doctor, lawyer, NFL quarterback, ﬁreman), Santoro informed her that he was going to be a wrestling coach in the Lehigh Valley. His mom was clearly hoping for a different answer. “She told me that I couldn’t coach, and back then, she was right because it was hard to a program whose list of prior coaches reads like a who’s who of college wrestling. Despite a lineup littered with underclassmen, Santoro has enjoyed quite a ﬁrst act, leading the Mountain Hawks to a 20-1 start and a top-10 ranking nationally in 2008-09—thanks to dual-meet wins over Pittsburgh, Maryland, Oklahoma State, Michigan, and Penn State. Pat Santoro has led the wrestling team to a top-10 national ranking. make a living as a coach,” Santoro recalls. “But everything worked out for me.” It certainly has. Santoro is the Lawrence E. White ’64 Head Wrestling Coach at Lehigh, a storied program where his father (Dick Santoro ’59) and older brother (Rich Santoro ’84) both wrestled and 14 lehigh alumni bulletin “Our success is due in large part to Coach Santoro’s work ethic,” says senior co-captain Trevor Chinn. “His scouting reports are spot on. You enter each match knowing everything about your opponent down to what shoe the guy ties first.” His instant success at Lehigh continues a lifelong pattern of proving skeptics wrong. “He aims high and then puts feet to his dreams,” says Rande Stottlemyer, who coached Santoro at the University of Pittsburgh. “Once he sets goals, he takes positive steps toward reaching them every single day.” His hard-to-match work ethic—which Santoro says comes from watching the example his parents set as well as, he quips, from “fighting to get food as the youngest kid of five growing up”—has enabled him to achieve just about everything that a wrestler can during a career: back-to-back NCAA titles at 142 pounds in 1988 and 1989, fourtime member of the U.S. National Team, and alternate for the 1996 Olympic Team and the 1999 World Team. “We recruited him because he was a great kid with good wrestling genes, as both his dad and brother wrestled at Lehigh,” Stottlemyer says. “But I had no idea Pat would work so hard and blossom like he did.” Entering Pitt as a walk-on, Santoro graduated as the school’s most decorated wrestler— still ranking ﬁrst in career wins (167) and pins (43). Upon graduating, he wrestled for his country and began chasing his boyhood dream of coaching in his hometown. That quest included a nine-year stint as a Lehigh assistant, including eight seasons as the top assistant to Greg Strobel. Santoro then became the University of Maryland head coach, where he captured the school’s ﬁrst ACC title in 35 years in 2008. When his dream job, Lehigh, opened up, Santoro had a difficult, “should-I-stay-or-should-I-go” decision to make, but he ultimately opted to head home. Santoro, a guy who has made a habit of setting extremely lofty goals, then drawing colorme-skeptical looks from others before outworking everyone to reach them, has a new one in mind. “Of course, we want to graduate all of our Lehigh wrestlers and produce All-Americans,” Santoro says. “But our ultimate goal is to bring a national title to Lehigh.” —Bill Doherty PHOTO BY DOUGLAS BENEDICT

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Lehigh Bulletin - Winter 2009 Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Research Arts & Culture Sports Teaming Up to Tackle Global Challenges Positively 4th Street A Sweet Job From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Winter 2009

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