Anatomy of a Coach: Mike Rogers

What makes a great coaching tandem? Is it discipline? The ability to relate and connect with athletes? Possessing the aptitude to fully understand and comprehend the X’s and O’s of a sport? What about fundraising for a program or recruiting? Or, like a special recipe, is it some complex combination of all of the above, plus a little something extra?

Being the perfect coach at any level of competition is hard enough. What makes it even more difficult is finding that perfect complement—the assistant coach. The next two articles will take a look at head coach Mike Rogers and assistant coach Matt Greenberg to see what makes them click. In this two part series, the goal is to uncover what makes them so good at what they do and to discover why they work so well together. The following is part one in the series.

Currently ranked seventh in the nation, American University has built quite a reputation for itself. With the top-ranked heavyweight in Ryan Flores and a host of other talented, experienced wrestlers, American would be any wrestling coach’s dream job. Established success, resources, and talented wrestlers. Is there much else a coach could want?

Head coach Mike Rogers used to be a part of that. As an assistant coach at American University only a few years ago, Rogers was an important member of program that was rebuilding and establishing itself as a national power in the collegiate wrestling world.

But, despite its recent success, American was not always the place to be. In 2003, just eight short years ago, American closed the doors on its wrestling program for almost six months. With little funding and general support from the school, the program was floundering, succumbing to the pressures and demands of being a division one program while trying to survive on a limited resource pool.

There was not a whole lot to celebrate and there was even less hope on American’s campus.

“[Ex-American head coach] Mark Cody was very helpful for me because he had a very similar experience with American University eight years ago,” Rogers said. “When he came in, they had one or two scholarships and they dropped the program before he even got there. He left Oklahoma State as a top assistant to take a very low paying job in an expensive area of DC and he was able to build that program up to the point where it was finishing with the top teams in the NCAA and winning division one coach of the year.”

“When I talked to him, looking at the two situations, you have more to start with than I did,” Rogers continued. “So that gave me a lot of comfort.”

What Rogers is referring to is what helped convince him to show up in Lancaster in 2010. When F&M first called Rogers, it featured a floundering program that can’t give out scholarships, doesn’t sport world class wrestling facilities, and didn’t have a reputation as a premier wrestling institution. For as many struggles as F&M had when Rogers first set up shop in Lancaster, Cody, now the head coach at Oklahoma, clearly believed Rogers would have an opportunity to succeed as the head coach of the Diplomats.

Neither Cody nor Rogers ever believed the rebuilding project Rogers was going to have to undertake when he arrived at F&M was going to be easy. Trying to convince top of the line wrestlers to attend a small, expensive school that doesn’t give scholarships is a difficult task. However, that doesn’t mean Rogers is shying away from the challenge.

“When he walked in it was like the slow-motion entrance from She’s All That,” assistant coach Matt Greenberg said. “Jennifer Love Hewitt walks into a party and everything slows down. When he walked in, I knew he was the guy. I knew that was the guy I wanted to work with and learn under. He came from a great program. His strengths and his ability to lay out a plan to show you what he’s expecting from you have made me a better person and a better coach.”

Thanks to many of Rogers’ gifts as a coach, F&M has a bright wrestling future. Those close to Rogers and those who know him well don’t have too many doubts regarding his ability and are confident he will turn F&M into a contender. Rogers and F&M wrestling will be successful in the future, and that’s important to him. But to say that’s all that matters would be to ignore much of what Rogers is about as a person.

Going back to when Rogers was considering whether or not accept the position of head coach at F&M, he placed a great deal of emphasis on how coaching at F&M would fit in to his family life. Luckily for the wrestling program, it fit in quite nicely.

“I think the thing that really sealed the deal for me was that my wife was able to find a job locally,” Rogers said. “I was able to get my family back together. I was driving from Lock Haven down to D.C. twice a week. It was taking a strain on the family, particularly with two young kids.”

“So I think that the opportunity to coach a division one program, that was appealing,” Rogers continued. “But I liked the location and talked with some people and there’s a lot of help, there’s a lot of people here for support. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, which doesn’t scare me at all, but I wanted to know there was support for the program. And the deal sealer was my wife was able to find a job.”

Now that he’s here, F&M and the surrounding community has left its mark on Rogers and, at least so far, the job has turned out to be everything he could have asked for. However, as his time here continues, he is hoping to have an equally significant impact on the school itself. What Rogers brings to the wrestling room is a realization that a school doesn’t need to have all the nicest equipment and dozens of scholarships to make it to the top. He should know; for almost his entire wrestling career, Rogers has been a little bit behind everyone else.

Although he was born in Iowa in the heart of wrestling country, he spent the majority of his childhood growing up in Florida where wrestling is a low priority on the sports totem pole. Football is king down south, and like most other kids growing up in The Sunshine State, Rogers began his athletic career on the gridiron. Ironically, it was an experience he had with football that made him turn to the sport that would stick with him for the rest of his life.

As he stepped onto the football field as a freshman in high school, the head coach looked at him and told him to head back to the locker room. In this particular Florida town, only upperclassmen got a shot at the varsity squad. If Rogers wanted to play football his freshman year, it was going to have to be for the JV team.

Not having the shot to at least go out for the varsity squad irked Rogers, and it drove him away from the sport for good.

“My freshman year, I remember going out for the football team and they told me I had to start on JV,” Rogers said. “I kind of had a discussion with the coach and said, ‘Well, I want to go out for varsity.’ He said freshman play for JV, and I said, ‘Well I don’t want to try out for JV.’ Granted, I was probably only 110 pounds soaking wet at this point, but it really bothered me that I didn’t have the opportunity to try out or compete on the varsity team.”

“So I kind of walked off the field,” Rogers continued. “As I was walking off, the assistant coach saw me and asked where I was going. Now, he had happened to take over the wrestling program recently and said, ‘If you’d like to go out for wrestling then you can wrestle. If you win the spot, you can wrestle for varsity.’ I thought that was very fair. So I went out, won the spot, and got to start.”

Rogers’ career as a wrestler did not start off with a bang. He admitted that, as a freshman starting for the varsity team, he didn’t exactly dominate on the mat.

“I struggled my first year, I got beat up,” Rogers said of his first year as a wrestler. “I only won three or four matches, but I spent the summer really getting better and won more and then eventually won the state title.”

The one constant that has been present throughout Rogers’ career both as a wrestler and as a coach has been his dedication and hard work. He was just the second person from his family to graduate from high school and the first to go to college, and he lived a very blue-collar lifestyle growing up with his father and helping out with the family business.

This work ethic helped mold Rogers into the person he is today and, at the time, it helped turn him into a successful wrestler who loved the sport.

“I grew up working construction and putting up fences,” Rogers said. “My dad owned a fence company and I would wake up in the morning, put up a fence, go to school, go to practice, go work in the shop, and that was my day.”

As the first person to go to college in his family, Rogers didn’t have much to go on during his college search, but he ended up in Pennsylvania at Lock Haven. The opportunity to attend a school that appreciated wrestling was to big draws for Rogers when he had the chance to visit the campus.

“What I really liked, and why I ended up in Pennsylvania, again going back to how the sport’s not very, there not a lot of appreciation for the sport in Florida, so I really wanted to go somewhere that embraced wrestling and really knew what goes into wrestling,” Rogers said. “Wrestling was really important to the whole school and the whole community.”

It was at Lock Haven where Rogers, from a wrestling standpoint, really learned that, in order to be successful at the sport, a team doesn’t need state of the art equipment, a bunch of high school All-Americans, or a brand new wrestling specific facility. A bunch of really good guys and a place to practice is all Rogers and his team at Lock Haven needed to leave its mark on the wrestling world.

“We achieved things with minimal resources, equipment, and all this stuff people claimed you needed to be successful. We didn’t have it,” Rogers said. “Bringing that experience [to F&M], I’ve realized you don’t need the best wrestling room, you don’t need all the coaches in the world, and a budget where you can fly everywhere. All that stuff helps, it makes life easier, but I still think it can be done.”

“You just need a bunch of good guys, a wrestling room, and a good schedule. And that’s what we have [at F&M].”

Throughout his entire experience as a wrestler and his time spent as an assistant coach at American, Rogers has picked up countless lessons that have helped guide him to the point he is at now. What his job is now is to make an impact on F&M using all these lessons and insights he’s gathered over the years.

While Rogers wants F&M wrestling to be successful and he wants the team to have All-Americans, he realizes that achieving success on the mat is not the sole purpose of his job.

“Everyone wants have All-Americans and national champions,” Rogers said. “That’s obviously important. But even more importantly, we need to develop young men to be strong leaders. We need to bring in kids with the right character and then we mold them and shape them into responsible leaders who are going to go out and do great things. I think if you do that, the All-Americans and the champions will come.”

“I think if we go out and try and find the best athlete regardless of what kind of person he is or what kind of student he is, I think he can become an All-American, but he washes out of school,” Rogers added. “Our goal is to have All-Americans, Academic All-Americans, and national champions on the mat, but within the perspective of the overall experience here.”

“If we have guys graduating here and getting good jobs out there in the world and becoming leaders, then I’d say I’ve left my mark.”

Even though Rogers has not yet been the head coach at F&M for two years, one can feel the culture of the program changing. The wrestlers have bought in to what Rogers is selling, and it shows. They’re all equally invested in what they’re doing on the mat as well as in the classroom and outside of F&M’s walls.

Rogers spoke a lot about how wrestling makes one accountable to himself, how it demands the best out of someone and how a wrestler has no one to blame but himself when things go wrong. His wrestlers seem to have embodied that in every facet of their lives, owning up to their athletic, academic, and professional performances.

When Rogers first set foot on F&M’s campus, he inherited a program unsure of its future and one that lacked the necessary hope to get itself turned around. Now that he’s here, that’s all changed. It’s hard not be excited about what’s going on in the wrestling room in the basement of the Mayser Center or on the mat in the gymnasium on match nights.

From the outside, F&M’s turnaround may be somewhat surprising. However, if you poke your head into the office at the top of the stairs of the offices in the Mayser Center, you’ll likely see a coach hard at work. And if you get a chance to speak with him, then anything surprising about F&M’s turnaround melts away.