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Whether it&#8217;s the athletes, coaches, front office staff, athletic directors or training staff, it takes a small community to build a winning atmosphere, no matter the level of the sport.Success starts from the bottom and works its way up, and each level plays an integral part. Without everyone on the same page, any team would have a hard time making progress toward building a successful program.Away From the Game profiles movers and shakers in the Wyoming Valley athletics world, starting with Wyoming Seminary head wrestling coach Scott Green.Green and the Blue Knights recently pulled off an upset victory over top-ranked Blair Academy &#8212; a dual meet Wyoming Seminary failed to register a single offensive point in the first three matches. The seventh-year head coach described the 31-27 Jan. 13 win as one of the &#8220;most-significant&#8221; victories he&#8217;s had as the Blue Knights&#8217; head coach.In his six previous seasons, Green has led the Blue Knights to the 2014 National Prep Wrestling Overall Team title, six straight Pennsylvania Independent Schools Wrestling Tournament titles, achieved a 121-4 record and his athletes have secured 49 individual state titles and 16 national prep titles.EBERLE: The real reason why I wanted to come to you first was because of your win last week against Blair Academy. Obviously, they come in here the No. 1 team in the nation and you have quite the rivalry with them. Just take me through that meet and what it was like to pull out the victory.SCOTT GREEN: Well, I think going in we knew that we were the underdog, but we also knew that if we stayed true to the way that we trained and believed in the way that we trained that we were going to be in a position to win. Things could break our way.When you&#8217;re in a rivalry like that, sometimes you have to throw records and who&#8217;s favored, and things like that, out of the window because there&#8217;s so many other factors in that.So we saw their roster at weigh-ins. We knew we&#8217;d have some good strategic moves to get some of the matchups that we wanted and our guys performed ultimately.What was going through your head, especially going into that last match there?I think we were pretty disappointed &#8212; and we definitely have to make some corrections &#8212; when we didn&#8217;t score an offensive point in any of the first three matches, and didn&#8217;t win any of those. So we knew everything had to be really perfect after that because we kind of thought we could get two of those. And then guys just started responding and pulling out huge performances with bonus points.Once we got the pin from Beau (Barlett) we kind of looked up and said, &#8216;Hey, this is a reality now.&#8217; Then Jack (Davis) going out and winning, we felt really, really good after that because we knew Alfonso (Martinez) was going to be the favorite.Speaking of the rough start you guys had in that match, how does this rank as far as wins for you with this program?I think it&#8217;s probably the most-significant dual meet win since I&#8217;ve been here. You could argue the first time we beat Blair in a dual was a little bit more significant than that because it had been so long and that was like announcing that we were competitive, but I think for the most part I went in thinking that we were even or probably the favorites.I think the improbability of this one factors into having it be the most-significant one.So back-tracking a little bit, I know you came here in 2010. With the six straight titles and only losing the four dual meets &#8212; it&#8217;s great success and you&#8217;re one of the top teams in the nation year in and year out &#8212; but how would you characterize your entire career here so far?I think it&#8217;s been rewarding. It was a little bit of a leap of faith for me to step down from the college Division I ranks to come here and coach at a high school. It&#8217;s a good mix of what I was looking for. I&#8217;ve come in and been able to recruit and develop a high caliber of athlete, and student, that are going on and doing really well at the college level right now.You were last at your alma mater at Binghamton. Were you looking to move away from college or was this just an opportunity you couldn&#8217;t refuse? Well, we had a club in Binghamton and we had student-athletes from Wyoming Seminary that would come up there to train previous to that. (Former Wyoming Seminary head wrestling coach) John Gordon being a friend of mine, when he made the decision to move kind of approached me about it, talked to me about it. Really sold me on what it could do for me and my family, give me an opportunity to come back in the classroom, too, which I hadn&#8217;t been doing in my four years at Binghamton.It wasn&#8217;t anything I was actively looking for because I had been in Binghamton area, coaching high school and college, for two decades. This was a really unique opportunity that just fit a lot of different things besides wrestling.Coming in, especially with Sem, it&#8217;s a little bit different than other high schools because there is the extra year of post-graduate school, so there&#8217;s the recruiting aspect to it. If you look up and down your roster, there&#8217;s kids from all over the nation. Just describe that aspect of that, adding on to the fact that you&#8217;re teaching here and have your season.Well, John really established Sem as a national powerhouse. Not at the level we&#8217;re at now, but starting from scratch and got it to the point were people knew that Wyoming Seminary wrestling was a good program, and then I&#8217;ve been able to been add on to that.I&#8217;ve really kind of been making this brand &#8212; Wyoming Seminary wrestling &#8212; nationally known. I&#8217;ve used some things that we did in colleges and a lot of different experiences from a lot of different previous jobs coming in here, and it was really a nice chance to blend that experience together in a high school that does have some aspects of a college to it.Coming from the college background and you&#8217;ve had athletes succeed at the international level and things like that. Is that something you bring when you go talking to these young kids that are looking to come to a different high school like this &#8212; a prep high school?Yeah, you don&#8217;t have to even talk to them anymore because they&#8217;re seeing our guys on the (Cadet) World team. Jack Davis going out an placing fifth in Tbilisi, (Georgia) last year. He makes a connection with Mosha Schwartz, who was on that team, too, and he&#8217;s here.Guys having that aspiration, and wrestling being such a close-knit group, kids around the country see our guys reaching their goals. If they are inclined to want a rigorous academic experience, too, and they come out and visit and like what they see, it&#8217;s a good sell.You look at your roster, and I think there&#8217;s about 10 or 15, or so, kids on your team from the area. How would you say that you&#8217;ve seen an increase in wrestling within the area during your six years here?We&#8217;re thrilled to get more local kids. When I first got here there weren&#8217;t any, so we&#8217;re excited about that because it shows a kid coming up through X-Caliber Wrestling Club that they can be the next Jack Davis. It doesn&#8217;t have to be a kid from across the country that comes here to be successful. It can be anybody that starts off in our club and comes up through it.I think our club, and our presence and our willingness to wrestle more teams locally is going to raise the level of the area because at our tournament, tougher teams in our backyard they can get a shot at when maybe that wasn&#8217;t happening before.I was going to say, has Sem wrestling against the local teams brought a positive impact to District 2 wrestling?I do. I think that our ability to be kind of a magnet for teams that want to come here and compete trickles down to the high school programs that are willing to jump in. It&#8217;s not always a wonderful proposition to go against a team like ours, but if you&#8217;re going to develop your very best kids you can push them by coming in and competing at one of our events.So for you, what is it about wrestling that made you turn the sport into a career?I wasn&#8217;t a super competitive athlete myself. I wrestled in college, but I wasn&#8217;t a guy who went out and lit the world on fire during my own competitive career, but I always studied the sport. I tried to put myself in the room with the best coaches possible. I tried to put myself in the room with the best athletes possible and learn from them because I knew I wanted to coach. I knew I had something to give the sport besides competition and that could be a legacy that I left behind in the sport.I think that and the relationships that you build with the student-athletes were my real motivations to wanting to stay with it and become a high-level say.Leaving that legacy behind you; you&#8217;re in year seven now and you&#8217;ve already started to build something special here. What&#8217;s it like knowing that you are the coach for a national power team that is regarded very highly throughout the nation? Is there pressure to it? Does it just make for a great challenge for you?Sure, there&#8217;s always pressure. You want to put out the best product you can at all times, and you want to put out the best product you can in the classroom at all times.It would be easy to kind of rest on laurels and say, &#8216;Eh, you know, we&#8217;re Top 20 every week and we have a good bunch of kids.&#8221; But that&#8217;s a tough mentality to adopt to. You want to have kids coming into the room that are motivated to be at the highest level possible and then put them around each other. You&#8217;re doing that and you&#8217;re telling them, &#8220;Well, it&#8217;s OK if we&#8217;re the 20th-best team or the 15th-best team in the country.&#8221; They&#8217;re not believing you. They think, &#8220;Hey, if coach really believed in us, he&#8217;d be talking about being No. 1.&#8217; That&#8217;s something that we talk about every day, to be at that peak &#8212; that you can&#8217;t accept anything else.Is there pressure to it? Sure, but it&#8217;s welcomed pressure.When you&#8217;re out recruiting, what are the types of kids that you&#8217;re looking to bring into your program? Because, obviously, when you&#8217;re competing at a national level it&#8217;s that much more difficult and you&#8217;re looking for that much more of a special kid.I think, when we&#8217;re looking for kids and kids are looking for us, you have to be sure it&#8217;s the right fit. You can&#8217;t oversell the wrestling part of it or they&#8217;re going to be home in two months because they&#8217;re not ready for what we&#8217;re going to expect from them in the classroom.You&#8217;re looking for a kid who loves the sport, No. 1, because they have to, to leave their family behind to start their a new. But they also have to be a kid who&#8217;s willing to invest in everything Sem has to offer.So I often tell kids like, &#8216;Here&#8217;s the quiz that you want to take because after you&#8217;ve done your tour and you&#8217;ve looked at and checked everything out, you want to go stand in the middle of our campus and look around and say, &#8216;Do I want to be here for the next four years of my life?&#8217;&#8221; If the answer is yes, great. Then you have to follow it up and say, &#8220;What if I can&#8217;t compete? What if something happens to me injury-wise that I&#8217;m no longer able to wrestle?&#8221; Do you still want to be here the rest of your high school career? If the answer is no, then you have to really have an honest conversation with yourself because we&#8217;re not a weekend wrestling camp, we&#8217;re not a wrestling training center.We&#8217;re an institution and everyone has to buy into all aspects of that institution.And lastly, to sort of wrap it up, I know that you&#8217;re teaching here and your wife teaches here, as well, and you live in Kingston. Living here, being here for seven years now, what do you like about Kingston, on a personal side?We liked that it was similar to what we left. Binghamton and Kingston are on the same river, different city. So that&#8217;s not a huge change for us or anything like that, but we enjoy the fact that our kids have really grown in this community, too. That they&#8217;ve been able to explore a wide variety of interests that they might not have been able to involved in a public school.My wife teaches, and she&#8217;s not teaching 35 kids in a New York State fifth-grade classroom any more. She feels like her impact on the kids that she has is greater. My daughter&#8217;s in high school now and she&#8217;s in Sem&#8217;s great arts program. So that certainly is different than if we had stayed where we were. My son plays lacrosse and he loves it &#8212; so it&#8217;s been a real nice integration for the Green family into the community.And when you&#8217;re not coaching or teaching, or doing things like that, what do you do outside of this?I read. I&#8217;m an English teacher, so I read a lot.That&#8217;s about my only real ability to get away from wrestling. Wrestling is what I do, you know? It&#8217;s a full-time responsibility, and it&#8217;s a full-time job and it&#8217;s a full-time love.I&#8217;m not one of those guys where, &#8220;Oh, I need to take a break from wrestling.&#8221; If I&#8217;m taking a break, wrestling&#8217;s probably involved some how.So, what do you read, normally? What are the books, the authors?Pretty much anything for the most part. I do a lot of reading to see if there&#8217;s anything I can teach in class or things like that. I probably read &#8212; between online versions and paper versions &#8212; between six or seven newspapers a week. That&#8217;s the kind of content I read.Well, I appreciate it, coach.Alright, no problem.<style>
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<div class="neCaption">Wyoming Seminary wrestling coach Scott Green keeps an eye on the timer during Wednesday's practice at the Great Hall on the Wyoming Seminary campus in Kingston. 1/18/17. Sean McKeag | Times Leader</div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/web1_TTL011917ScottGreen2.jpg</photo0><caption0>Wyoming Seminary wrestling coach Scott Green keeps an eye on the timer during Wednesday's practice at the Great Hall on the Wyoming Seminary campus in Kingston. 1/18/17. Sean McKeag | Times Leader</caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div><div class="neFile"><img class="neImage" src="https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/web1_TTL011917ScottGreen1.jpg">
<div class="neCaption">Wyoming Seminary wrestling coach Scott Green oversees Wednesday's practice at the Great Hall on the Wyoming Seminary campus in Kingston. 1/18/17. Sean McKeag | Times Leader</div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo1>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/web1_TTL011917ScottGreen1.jpg</photo1><caption1>Wyoming Seminary wrestling coach Scott Green oversees Wednesday's practice at the Great Hall on the Wyoming Seminary campus in Kingston. 1/18/17. Sean McKeag | Times Leader</caption1><photoCredit1></photoCredit1></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta>By DJ Eberledjeberle@www.timesleader.com</bylineMeta></div>

Away From the Game: Wyoming Seminary wrestling coach Scott Green