By Mike Finn, W.I.N. Editor
College coaches get many tip sheets on the best high school recruits. Penn State mentor Troy Sunderland admits he certainly discovered Phil Davis in an unusual location.
“We were at the state tournament in Hershey, Pa., and I was in the rest room, where there was a sports page on a bulletin board above the urinal,” said Sunderland, who was at the 2000 PIAA state tournament to see his future wrestler Joel Edwards, who eliminated Davis from the state tournament. “I got to reading an article on the tournament about how Davis jumped on a bus by himself and went up to State College during the summer for a freestyle and Greco tournament and jumped on the bus and went home.
“I thought to myself that this is a special kid to do that on his own.”
And this was about the same time Davis was first considered a college prospect.
“I didn’t know much about wrestling until high school and as far as Penn State wrestling, college wrestling did not cross my mind until my junior or senior year of high school,” said Davis, who attended Harrisburg High School, where he was known as much for his tennis ability as his wrestling.
“Tennis was kind of the family sport. I was good at it and we did it on the weekends,” he recalled. “Wrestling was something that I discovered myself. I started to have a passion for wrestling, but it’s a lot tougher when you don’t have someone guiding you along the way. I had to learn a lot of lessons by myself.”
Davis knew he had to find better competition if he wanted to be a better wrestler. So he decided to search for competitions around the state.
“I didn’t have a great practice partner in the room in high school,” recalled Davis, later a three-time PIAA place-winner. “I chased down whatever competition that I could in the off-season. That made me so much more of a better wrestler.
“I just needed to be put in the atmosphere with other great wrestlers and be exposed to higher-level competition.”
And those trips eventually took him to Fargo, N.D., where he finished second in the 2002 and 2003 Junior National Greco-Roman tournaments. Soon, he found himself in the Penn State wrestling room, where another moment of success proved to him that he belonged on the Div. I level.
“The first time I took down (former Penn State All-American) Pat Cummins in the practice room, I said to myself, ‘we can do something with this. You are going places,’ ” recalled Davis.
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