When asked about his dedication to the sport of wrestling, senior Jake Southwick has a saying he loves to tell people: “The day I stop wrestling is the day you’ll see my name in the obituaries.”

Southwick found high success at the NCAA Division 2 National Championships held at the University of Nebraska this past March, finishing fourth in the nation at 285 and earning All-American honors. He is the third wrestler in school history to win 36 matches in a season with a record of 36-6. He also broke the school record for pins in a single season with 18 pins.

The successful career Southwick has had to date started simply enough. He cites watching his older brother Justin wrestling as his motivation for getting into this “fun-looking” sport. When Southwick started in sixth grade, however, he would find himself with a long road to travel in order to reach success.

Stating that he wasn’t a good wrestler for his first few years, Southwick pointed to his sophomore year of high school for a major turning point in his career.

“At the end of my sophomore year, at a sectional tournament, I took a bad throw and cracked a couple of ribs on my left side and ended up losing the match and not being able to make it further to districts,” Southwick said.

This injury did not deter Southwick, as he was still determined to become the best wrestler he could possibly be.

“I absolutely love this sport,” Southwick said. “It’s a sport that once you start getting it, you start falling in love with it and once you fall in love with it, you can’t stop. You have to keep going. You have to be the best. You have to fight your way to the top, every single time.”

As for the hardship and pain that come with it, Southwick acknowledges it all as part of the position.

“It drains you, it takes everything out of you, but at the end of the day, you gotta keep yourself right back in it,” he said.

During his first two years of high school wrestling, Southwick met his first major influence, the mentor he could rely on, in his then-coach Richard “Doc” Leffler, who was in his seventies when he coached Southwick.

“[Leffler]’s the guy who got me started. He instilled that passion in me to always strive for the top, always keep going, keep getting better,” Southwick said. “He would still get in there and show a move even though he was old, because he loves wrestling. He said, ‘I’m giving everything I have to wrestling.'”

Once his junior year began, Southwick’s skills and abilities started to evolve, and he improved even more with the help of a second influence, a new high school coach named Scott Hreben. According to Southwick, Hreben was the coach of Russ Davie, the third-ranked Greco-Roman wrestler in the country.

“Hreben was excited to see everyone wrestling, but especially me, and every single time, he had some sort of little technique he could add on, something more,” Southwick said. “He started getting me to where I wasn’t just winning matches; I was doing real stuff in matches.”

Southwick started picking up different moves from Hreben and learned how to become harder to beat, followed with how to start winning matches. Southwick finished his junior year by placing fourth in the state and carried that momentum into the following year.

“My senior year, I was right on top of my game, I was feeling good,” Southwick said. “I was ranked number two in the state, but came across the number one guy in the semi-finals, so I actually lost to him and then came back and completely annihilated the last two guys to take third [place].”

Eventually, Southwick received a call from AU’s head wrestling coach Tim Dernlan asking him to check out Ashland and its wrestling team. Dernlan proved to be a third major influence on Southwick and his career.

“I really don’t think I would be where I am today without him being there,” Southwick said. “He is 100% on making you better. He will come in at any time of the day to give you technique, to watch film with you, to help you out with anything you need. When you are on the mat, he is right there, telling you what moves are open, what moves you should look, where your opponents’ weaknesses are. He is an amazing coach and I am extremely glad that we have him here.”

With all of his triumphs and trials to date, Southwick noted a very peculiar pattern that has thus far developed between both his high school and college careers: his freshman years were very much down years for him; his sophomore years saw him starting to put his skills together, though he suffered injuries (cracked ribs in high school and a blown out knee in college); and his junior years held vast improvements for him as he placed fourth in the state for high school and fourth in the nation as an Ashland Eagle.

Noting the “eerily similar” paths, Southwick hopes to surpass his high school third place finish. Sitting in the wrestling gym in Kates Gymnasium, with a dauntingly gold-painted wall adorned with banners displaying the values and achievements of the wrestling program surrounding him and the purple mats on the floor, Southwick pointed to one banner that shows a single word describing his favorite aspect of the wrestling team and what may help support another successful year: “Family.”

Everyone [on the team] will be willing to take a bullet for everyone else, but as soon as you step on these purple mats, everyone is just trying to annihilate everyone else,” Southwick said. “It is an all-out battle. People are in here to push you and make you better. Everyone wrestles their hardest because that’s the only way that you’re going to get better.”

Southwick noted previous state champions Tyler Hawkins, Jesse Campbell and Tyler Houska and second-ranked Clint Endicott as better state wrestlers who push him to become better every day.

“It’s that sense of battle in here that pushes you harder and then as soon as you leave this room, it’s all friends again,” Southwick said. “That aspect of our wrestling team is just amazing. It’s why I’ve gotten to the point I am.”

Southwick also related the other team values proudly displayed in the gym.

The first is “Passion.”

“Everyone in here is passionate about this sport. We sweat every day. There’s blood on the wall because somebody hit their knee too hard while doing pull-ups and didn’t stop. He broke a tile, cut his knee open and didn’t stop. He pushed himself harder.”

“Pride” is also displayed.

“All of us wear our colors proud; We’re proud of Ashland, we’re proud to be proud on Ashland’s wrestling team, and we push that to the max because this is what we do, this is who we are.”

Finally, “Honor” is displayed in the gym.

“You win with grace, you lose with dignity and you just keep that sense inside of you. Always respect your opponent, respect yourself, and respect your teammates.”

With the seriousness and devotion that Southwick gives to wrestling, there is an extremely fun side to be found in him. There’s a good chance that many on campus have seen Southwick’s fun side in the form of a giant gorilla costume.

“I have to say the gorilla suit has definitely brought in some of the best moments possible,” Southwick said of the times he’s worn the costume around friends and in public venues such as last year’s Banana Splittin’ event and in the middle of Convo, when he carried a student out through the front doors of the dining hall.

“I bought the gorilla suit in high school at a Halloween store,” Southwick said. “I had to shell out 50 bucks, which, back then, was actually a lot of money for me. It is probably the best buy I’ve ever made because there’s always something to do…like hanging upside down from a tree and freaking people out.”

Southwick has always been determined to keep every moment from being a dull one, whether it was by helping to organize a game of Humans Vs. Zombies on campus last year to always making an appearance at CAB’s Foam Dance Party. He even filled a wrestler’s room full of newspapers as an April fool’s prank.

Southwick encourages those on campus to go out and make their own fun to beat boredom as opposed to leaving campus and heading home.

“When you go home every single weekend, you’re like, ‘it’s boring there.’ Well, that’s because everyone goes home every single weekend,” he said.

“Keep yourself clean but go out and make friends, go out and hang out on weekends. Find a way to make friends…If you don’t go home, it won’t be as boring.”

As he makes the most out of his athletic career and campus experience at AU, Southwick is looking to the future with a dream that he’s held since kindergarten.

“My dream, after I graduate, is to continue on to professional wrestling,” Southwick said. “It’ll be a hard transition, of course. I know the facts, that there’s not often a great level of success for everyone in professional wrestling.”

Despite the risks and low career prospects, Southwick said that being a pro wrestler is all he’s ever wanted to be since grade school.

“Now that I’m grown up, I realize I have the size, I have the strength,” he said. “I hope I can pursue that as a career.”

If becoming a pro wrestler doesn’t happen for Southwick, though, he plans to attend grad school and pursue a higher degree into zoo keeping so he can hopefully be able to work with animals. Having grown up on a farm in a small town called Tontogany right outside of Bowling Green, Southwick has always loved animals and has been around them for much of his life.

These alternate plans still don’t change other wrestlers’ reactions to Southwick’s pursuit toward pro wrestling.

“I often get a lot of hassle from my teammates about being a professional wrestling nerd, if you will,” he said. “I understand people have their ideas about it, but it’s something that I really do have a love for and [the wrestlers] know I love it. “

Southwick’s favorite pro wrestler, Kurt Angle, happens to combine both of Southwick’s competitive passions; Angle won the gold medal in heavyweight freestyle wrestling at the 1996 Olympics while nursing a broken neck and is an active pro wrestler today.

“Growing up, I actually went to a few of [Angle’s] heavyweight wrestling training camps to work on my own technique for high school wrestling,” Southwick said. “He tossed me around a bit and kind of whupped my butt.

“[Angle] was always one of my favorite professional wrestling because of his speed, his power and what he can bring to the mat every single time,” he said. “It’s kind of a little added incentive that he and my coach here, Tim Dernlan, trained together at the Olympic training center for a while.”

While Angle has often described himself with words like Intensity, Integrity, and Intelligence, Southwick can aptly use these descriptors with an additional “I” word: Intriguing.