On October 10th 2019 Kyle Snyder made an announcement on social media that he would be leaving Ohio State’s RTC, where he won three world/Olympic gold medals, and would be taking up residency at the Nittany Lion Wrestling Club in State College, PA. 

I would have to assume that one of the reasons that he made the move to Penn State was to add to his wrestling repertoire. Not only do Cael and co. have a reputation for having diverse skillsets, they also have one of the best stable of weights in the world. With a year's worth of work under his belt in his new training hub hopefully we will be able to see the fruits of his labors this weekend at Senior Nationals. 

What Snyder Has Added So Far

Even before Snyder was at the Nittany Lion Wrestling Club, you could see that there were parts of his game that he was adding to. Snyder was extremely reliant on leg attacks as most of our country’s athletes are, but over the course of the last year and change he’s been trying to add upper body attacks and big throws to his wrestling lexicon. 

Exhibit A would have to be at the 2019 Beat The Streets event in NYC where he threw Nishan Randhawa strait back from rear standing with out even moving his feet. Exhibit B would have to be the monster throw against Haydin Zilmer. I'm not 100% sure that he wasn’t trying to simply catch his balance when throwing Zilmer, but he did take one step when getting Zilmer off the ground. Take a side-by-side look at the two throws (a…Snyd-by-Snyd, if you will.) 

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I recognize that the 2019 Farrell was after Snyder had made the move to State College, but I can’t imagine that any of the coaches or the partners had that much of an impact on his wrestling prowess that early. 

What About Plan B? 

Over the last couple of years since Kyle has won a world championship, one of the things that he has struggled with is being able to adapt on the fly to certain positions. Let's be honest, the strength is still there, the hand fight is definitely still there, but he had some trouble in scrambles. Between the 2018 loss to Sadulaev in Budapest and the loss to Mohammadian from Iran he was clearly uncomfortable in situations. See for yourself here. 

2015-2017 Snyder was so great at keeping people off of his legs and scoring extremely fast when he got to his opponent’s legs that this part of his game was never really exposed. 

The Nittany Lion Wrestling Club spends a TON of time improving in those little positions that are in between specific wrestling techniques. This is where I'm hoping to see the biggest gains from Snyder. 

I love Snyder’s commitment to improving his craft. When I saw that he was registered for Senior Nationals this weekend I got pretty stoked. Think about it: he has no real incentive for competing this weekend other than to knock some rust off and try new things. If we’re still being honest, Snyder is a pretty big favorite to win this weekend; he’s got multiple wins over the top contenders in this field. How great would it be to see Snyder allow people to get in oh his legs just to see if he could scramble out.