Wrestling: Monroe's Joe Eurell is the 2024-25 Home News Tribune Coach of the Year
Joe Eurell knew the Monroe wrestling team had talent, but he also had to be honest. So sometime around mid-December or early January, the Falcons head coach didn’t sugarcoat anything to his wrestlers.
“They asked me, they were like, ‘Do you still think we can win sections?,’” Eurell recalled.
His answer?
“I told them straight-up no,” Eurell said. “Absolutely not. ... I’m just like you guys aren’t getting it, nothing’s clicking with you. … They were doing everything right, it was just they weren’t putting everything together. The way they were working in the room, it was what they normally always do. They were always a group of hard-working kids. It wasn’t anything that they were doing wrong, they just weren’t clicking and I could see that.”
He had a message for them.
“We can’t want it more than you,” he said. “We were just saying, if you guys still want it, go ahead and take it. Like late January or early February, it’s yours. If you want it, it’s right there. … That pretty much just became our mantra, if you want it – go get it.”
Now, teams can take it one of two ways – whimper, wilt and deflate the rest of the way. Or, get going.
They went. The end result: Monroe captured the Central Group 5 title as underdogs for the first sectional crown in program history and advanced nine wrestlers to the region tournament.
Eurell is the Home News Tribune’s Greater Middlesex Conference Coach of the Year for leading the way. Usually, that honor doesn’t come from a team that finished 18-15 but they kept improving despite some losses against difficult opponents.
So, how did the team turn it around?
“We started to take our foot off the gas a little bit,” said Eurell, who wrestled at Jackson Memorial for Scott Goodale and competed at Wagner College. “This year was really a special year because it was wrestler-led. This was my eighth year as a head coach and I would say that this year the guys handled it to themselves. They really did. I attribute all to the way that they conducted themselves. The way that they didn’t get stuck in the mud. They just realized that we can figure this out. There’s going to be tough times but it’s all about how you respond to it and that’s what they did.”
Take the Shumsky twins, Josh and Matt, who each volunteered to drop a weight class for the sectional run. They moved back up for the individual postseason but their going at 144 and 150 helped the Falcons with matchups in the sectionals.
That’s senior leadership.
The postseason run was magical for Monroe fans, which ended in a 36-33 loss to Bridgewater-Raritan in the Group 5 semifinals. Consider this, one publication’s four writers all predicted a Hillsborough/Old Bridge sectional final.
In the semifinals, Monroe edged Hillsborough 34-32 and then topped Old Bridge 34-31 in the championship.
The Falcons found a way.
Against Old Bridge, Luke Pawliczak scored a key pin at 165 in a tossup match when he was losing. Pawliczak actually started the season at 144 but moved up when he had trouble making weight. At 132, Jafar Rizvi avenged a major decision loss in the regular season to win 15-13.
Nick Cavallo (120) and Anthony Marcos (285) also won. Kylega Capodanno (106) took the final bout, 13-5, to clinch the victory, which was no sure thing on paper. He beat his opponent 7-4 earlier in the season.
Even the wrestlers who lost saved bonus points in James Verderami (113), Joel Cholula (126), Arjun Biju (157), Yidan Wong (175) and Hayden Cannon (215). Add it all up, and those four or five points were key. Anthony Caponegro (138) fell against the Knights, but he was a GMCT champ and state qualifier.
It’s called team wrestling.
Eurell, a special education teacher at Monroe, carried a different perspective than years past, in which he conveyed to the team. He said he was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma and went through treatments last offseason, something that he didn’t reveal publicly until the region tournament in early March.
He noted the first practice he ever missed was after he got diagnosed before the region tournament in 2024. He decided to tell the team after losing hair and gaining weight.
“I said this is what’s going on,” Eurell recalled. “I went over the whole perspective thing. You could choose to feel sorry for yourself or you can say this is nothing that I can’t overcome. I still went to all the offseason tournaments and everything like that, our team camp. Had practices over the summer, all that stuff.”
Eurell is now cancer-free but that perspective remained.
“To me, I was much more laidback this year,” he said. “And I think I was so much more laidback because I was like, at the end of the day, you’re still going to go home and see your family. You’re still going to go home and hug your wife, hug your kids. The kids are still going to go home, hug their parents.
“The grand scheme of things, wrestling is very important, it’s not necessarily about winning but it’s about what the sport teaches you and if I wasn’t a wrestler there’s no way in hell I would have had the same mentality heading into the chemotherapy that I had. It just teaches you how to just be tough. Like Dan Gable says, once you wrestle, everything else in life is easy and that’s the truth.
“The hard times only makes you stronger. It’s a very important life lesson and the sooner that you learn that, the easier It’s going to be for you to overcome obstacles, for sure.”
When it came to the mat this season, it was the wresters’ turn to learn that.
“We wanted the kids to figure it out for themselves,” Eurell said. “We wanted the kids to want to fight for it and I think that’s possibly what did it. I’m sure there’s hundreds of other things that contributed to us wrestling so well at the end of the season but the fact of the matter is the kids wanted it for themselves and fought for each other.”
And that’s what made it such a special year.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: NJ Wrestling: Monroe's Joe Eurell is the HNT Coach of the Year
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