Not even a stroke could stop Illinois prep from 100 wins

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in WIN’s Volume 31 Issue 8, which was printed on May 6, 2025. Cohen Green is pictured holding a flag that became his mantra while making a return to the wrestling mats. 

By Sandy Stevens

For most high school wrestlers, achieving win No. 100 is a mark of excellence.

But for Cohen Green, an 18-year-old senior at Macomb (Ill.) High School, his feat carried much more significance.

During regionals his sophomore year, Cohen suffered a stroke on the mat. He was restricted from competition as a junior.

“The stroke actually started two weeks prior, in the last regular-season match,” Cohen recalled. “I felt a little sharp pain in the back of my head. Over the next two weeks, mostly at practice, it just kept getting worse. I thought my neck had been kinked.”

With his head hurting, he wrestled and won his first match at regionals.

“Early on in the second match, I hit my head, and the stroke fully took place. I lost my balance and started blacking out. I stumbled off after losing the match.”

In the stands, Mandi McRaven had already noticed her son was sleeping between matches. He told her he was okay.

“But my mom radar was going bananas,” she said. “Then he began vomiting profusely.”

She ran to get a friend — a doctor — who was working the concession stand. He realized that Cohen’s eyes weren’t tracking.

“Mom, I need to go to the ER. Something’s not right,” Cohen said. And his vomiting wouldn’t stop.

At the Macomb Hospital’s emergency care unit, a doctor saw something wrong in Cohen’s brain. Within 20 minutes, he was helicoptered to Peoria. There a doctor told Mandi that her son might not make it through the night, just to hope the situation wouldn’t get worse.

“They said he’d had a stroke, but they knew they couldn’t treat it because they didn’t know the cause,” she explained. “It had not been a dramatic (wrestling) match.”

Cohen spent seven days in intensive care. Eventually, a specialist theorized that since birth, the left artery in Cohen’s brain had been significantly smaller, so small that the blood couldn’t flow through.

“Fortunately, Cohen was on the mat when the stroke happened,” Mandi said.

After six months, no more checkups were required. He didn’t fail a single neurological exam at the hospital and he never lost speech.

“His body had prepared for this,” said Mandi, director of the career center at Western Illinois University. “He grew a lot of smaller arteries.

“He was young enough where he can repair himself — but not too young. If he were younger, this could have done more damage or even killed him.”

“Surprisingly, I was able to make a full recovery,” Cohen said.

He was restricted from activities for four weeks, then allowed to join the tennis team.

As a junior, he wasn’t allowed to wrestle or play football (where he’d spent two seasons as a cornerback on defense), but he entered his senior wrestling season at 157 pounds.

The first day of practice, his dad Ben, a Macomb science teacher and occasional volunteer coach, told his son, “You’re really good at monitoring yourself.”

“I was a little rusty at first, but I started winning more and noticed I was close to 100 wins,” Cohen said. “That’d been a goal. I knew I’d have to get through regionals and into sections to reach that goal.”

He met that goal in the first match of the second day of sections before losing in the Blood Round.

“It was something super exciting to get 100 wins — let alone wrestle — especially since I missed my junior year,” Cohen said. “I did it in just three years. It’s been awesome to have such supporters, loving peers and family around me to lift me up and help me.”

And that included the backing of his siblings: Caden, 23, a senior at Illinois State; Zach, 20, a sophomore at Northern Iowa; and Evynn McRaven, five.

In regard to the photo (pictured above) of Cohen holding a flag that says “Prove Them Wrong,” his mother, Mandi, stated, “This flag hangs in their high school wrestling room. It kind of become a mantra for Cohen. No one thought he could come back. Even when he did come back, everyone had doubts. They figured he would have lost his edge. His momentum. Because he was on fire his sophomore year. So he did just what everyone thought he couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to do again … win.”

In addition to wrestling this year, Cohen helped manage the Macomb Bombers football team and is again a member of the tennis team. He’s also in concert choir and sings tenor with the Bomber Basses, an all-boys choir.

The 18-year-old plans on continuing his education at Illinois State, studying athletic training, then physical therapy school — “trying to spot things like what happened to me and help people with their pain and rehab,” he said.