U.S. wrestlers become heroes for our youth, deserve respect

Photo: Team USA men’s freestyle claimed second place. Photo courtesy of USA Wrestling.

Editor’s Note: This story appeared in WIN’s Volume 31 Issue 12, the World Championships Special Issue, which printed on Sept. 19, 2025. Click here or call 641-792-4436 to subscribe to WIN Magazine. Buy a Digital or Combo Subscription to get immediate digital access to WIN’s Volume 31 Issue 12, which features wall-to-wall Team USA freestyle coverage from the UWW World Championships as well as the WIN Magazine/Spartan Combat Preseason High School Boys Rankings. 

By Bryan Van Kley

Kids need heroes. Actually, we all need heroes.

Life is hard, and having someone lead the way who’s successful, humble and lives life with honor and integrity is extremely important for all people. We’ve made it our mission at WIN to help readers get to know our sport’s heroes so young wrestlers have a roadmap to follow, and so fans are both inspired and entertained.

We hope you greatly enjoy our World Championships Special Issue of WIN. The pages of this magazine are filled with multiple Senior-level examples of heroes who represented us as Americans with honor in Croatia. In addition, you’ll see coaches featured whose main goal is to prepare young people for life and elevate the sport. Again, heroes, just at a different stage of life.

I know at times the Senior World Championships get virtually no coverage in the mainstream media because football is the main focus for these four to five months.

However, if you’re a parent or coach, grab every active wrestler you can find, go to YouTube and pull up Trent Hidlay’s gold-medal match. The former North Carolina State NCAA runner-up faced Russian Amanula Gadzhimagomedov, wrestling “unattached” for United World Wrestling because sanctions against Russia are still restricting them from representing that country as they compete. It truly is one of the most exciting matches you’ll ever watch. Then, after watching this legendary bout, pull up the five-minute interview with Hidlay. (If you don’t want to know the match details before seeing it, watch it before finishing this column.) After doing this … I’m very confident Hidlay will be one of your new favorites if he wasn’t already, but you’ll also more clearly understand the point of this column. The U.S. continues to have some outstanding heroes at the top levels of our sport.

“Representing Team USA is the coolest thing ever. We had a meeting the other night on 9/11 … just how much it means to me, and to people, to see guys come out and wrestle that hard, that’s why you do it,” Hidlay said after the win. “You wrestle to represent your country, yourself, and the people that build you up for it. I felt Iike I tried to do (my) best.”

Boy, did he ever!

Pull up more matches from other members of Team USA from the Worlds. You’ll find most of them are very entertaining and it will make you proud to be an American. Our men and women are showing what it looks like to compete courageously, carry themselves with honor and have the right type of mentality to achieve their full potential.

When asked by TheMat.com at the Worlds about having 2024 Olympic champ Sarah Hildebrandt coaching 2016 Olympic champ Helen Maroulis, coach Terry Steiner talked about the importance about having the sport’s leader stick around as coaches and to be heroes to look up to.

“The best thing we can do for our young kids is put our heroes in front of them … the best thing we can do for our heroes is put them in front of our young kids,” he said.

Obviously, we didn’t win as many matches as we could have or maybe even should have. I can tell you from following World Championships and Olympic Games for 27 years, no country ever gets through those tournaments without a number of surprising and stinging losses. After all, it’s the best in the world competing, so I guess we need to go into these tournaments with some more realistic expectations.

But, when you start following a number of our Senior-level Americans, you’ll commonly hear a number of them talking about how they’re not defined by the outcome of their matches. This is one of the biggest things wrestlers can learn from our Team USA pros. A lot of the wrestlers on the team who are Christians often talk about their identity in Christ, reminding people how that never changes regardless of what the scoreboard says at the final buzzer. You’ll hear these wrestlers and others comment about how their families and coaches still love them and respect them after big events are over, win or lose, and how the realization of that helps them to compete without fear of losing. 

This is all great stuff, and these are truths our heroes are reminding both active wrestlers and those of us whose competition days are behind us. Even our bad days and setbacks in life truly don’t define us.

The emotional Hidlay said he prayed to God when he was down eight points and officials were reviewing a scoring sequence that would have ended the match on a tech fall.

“I said a quick prayer, and just said, ‘Please give me one more chance and life, and I’ll figure a way out.’ I don’t remember anything that happened those last four minutes. It hurt bad. It felt really terrible doing it,” he said of his frantic offensive frenzy that led to an epic 13-10 come-from-behind World championship win. “It was my career in a nutshell. It was fitting the way that it happened.”

Make sure to also watch women’s wrestling legend Helen Maroulis capture her fifth World or Olympic title. She nearly retired after winning bronze at last year’s Olympics but came back with a vengeance to become only the seventh American to win at least four World titles. Maroulis talked about how a summer injury before the June Final X caused her to change her wrestling style, going more for the pin to compensate for her lack of conditioning.

“This reminds me of the verse (that says) God uses all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes … For young kids, there’s good things that can come from having an injury,” she said.

And lastly, another Team USA veteran whose matches and interviews you’ll have to watch is Kyle Snyder, who just won his fifth World or Olympic title. Off-the-mat issues led many to wonder if Snyder would even compete this year, but the former Ohio State star’s 2025 story is one of redemption from a mistake.

“I’ve failed God many times, but He’s never failed me. I didn’t even know if I was going to compete at Final X. And then I did and was able to wrestle well here. I’m very thankful. I’m looking forward to going home and being with my family. Without God and His love, and my wife and family, I would have been in big trouble with all of that more than I was,” Snyder said. “God’s love is unconditional.”

The U.S.’s men’s freestyle team finished second, women’s freestyle finished fifth, and Greco was still competing as of press time. Here’s a big round of applause to our American Senior-level teams for another year of hard work! Well done

(WIN Publisher Bryan Van Kley can be reached at Bryan@WIN-magazine.com.)