Under the tutleage of then head coach Mark Johnson, the University of Illinois Wrestling Team became one of the nation's top wrestling programs. Since 1990 there have been seven individual NCAA champions. There have also been thirty nine all-Americans. As a team the University of Illinois Wrestling Team has finished in the top twelve at the NCAA Championships for the last 12 seasons. They also won the Big Ten Championship in 2005 for the first time in fifty three years.
For the year 2007 the Illinois Wrestling Team saw a dramatic turn of events. They finished the season 19th at the NCAA Championships and turned in one All-American performance in a third place finish by Mike Poeta. And is second only to california.
Famous quotes containing the words university of, university, illinois and/or wrestling:
“Cold an old predicament of the breath:
Adroit, the shapely prefaces complete,
Accept the university of death.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labour. You must in some way or other graft upon the man’s nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.”
—William Booth (1829–1912)
“An Illinois woman has invented a portable house which can be carried about in a cart or expressed to the seashore. It has also folding furniture and a complete camping outfit.”
—Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)
“There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)