Ryan Warner is the host and producer of Wrestling Changed My Life Podcast. Here is his story.
What’s up folks! I was born in Geneseo, Illinois, which is a small (6k people) farming community on the border of Iowa and Illinois. While my Mom raised my brother Tanner and I, fortunately, Pops was around as well. I can’t tell you how many games of pick-up football or baseball we played back in the day.
I found wrestling when I was in kindergarten. What happened was, my older half-brother had wrestled in the 80’s and I found a pair of his wrestling shoes. They were the old school Asics Tigers with red and gold trim. From then on the fascination grew and before we knew it, Tanner and I were wrestlers. We didn’t take it seriously at first – maybe wrestling 20 matches a year in elementary school, with .500% records.
Once middle school hit we started to see success. Tanner placed second at the IKWF state tournament twice and I placed twice as well. Side note – one of the best memories I have is walking with Tanner in the state finals grand march. The turning point in our success was two-fold. One, my mom was extremely dedicated and equally as obsessed with wrestling as we were (she was even a certified referee at one point). She drove Tanner and I to tournaments all over the Midwest and looking back now, I have no idea how she did it with the small amount of money we had. The second factor was our Pops putting us on a weight lifting plan. He would chart our plan for weeks at a time and that really paid off once we hit middle school.
In high school I was good, but not great: 3x state qualifier in the big-school division of Illinois and a 1x placer. Make no mistake though, I was completely obsessed with wrestling. Our TV was filled with matches from the World Championships (somehow I got my hands on the 2001 Worlds in middle school), or any documentary I could find. My favorites were Competitor Supreme, Freestyle (Gable), the Brands Brothers’ doc (which I can’t find anywhere online), Lincoln McIlravy (also can’t find this one) and the Season by ESPN. For Christmas, I would get new wrestling shoes and tickets to the Midlands, and for Birthdays it was tickets to the 2004 Olympic Team Trials or to the Iowa Wrestling Camps. I even raised money to go to the Sunkist Kids camp at ASU in middle school. I would tape my goals on the fridge and bathroom mirrors. Wrestling is all I would talk or think about. I once went 42 days in a row wearing only wrestling shirts to school. You can imagine how much impressed the ladies were.
Looking back now I realize that I was always more of a fan of the sport than a student, meaning that I could tell you the history of Iowa or John Smith in a moment’s notice and often times knew more about the history of the sport than our coaches did. I was also obsessed with the planning and business side of things. Here is an example. During the spring of my freshman year, March Madness was the rage. Rather than filling-out an NCAA bracket, I created a 32-team world dual championships. It was planned to the T: the arena the teams would wrestle in, the scores of the duals, and even the wrestle-backs were all planned. If I remember correctly, USA beat Russia in a razor-close ‘dual’. I would also imagine owning a wrestling team, designing the logo, singlets, warm-ups, etc.
After high school, I got into coaching. First, it was coaching folkstyle in the winter for various schools in the Quad Cities. Then in the spring of ‘08 (my first year out of high school), Tanner and I founded the Outlaw Wrestling Club, which was a freestyle/greco club that ran from March – July. This was one of the happiest and most rewarding periods of my time in wrestling. At its peak, we had 90 wrestlers from 20+ schools and had an Outlaw clothing line to go with it. I have no idea how the parents let me take their minivans loaded with kids to North Dakota, but they did and it was amazing. Good friends from this time include Ethan Ball, Topher Carton, Tony Devriese, the Parks / Chases / Ryans, and TONS more.
After grad school, the wrestling fun wound down and I moved to California to join the real world. For the next 5 years I worked in tech sales in San Francisco. Because of my wrestling background, I did well and really enjoyed sales (I still do to this day). And, though I wasn’t involved with wrestling I followed it closely, staying up late to watch the Yarigan or skipping work to watch the NCAA’s.
During this time I also started a podcast with my roommate at the time and good friend Tom Alaimo. It was called TR Talk and the theme was focused on helping millennials in the job market by learning from our guests – successful business people, writers, and athletes. It was a huge turning point in my life as I realized my love for podcasts. I was already an avid listener of the Joe Rogan Experience but running a podcast was incredibly exciting. We had a good run with TR Talk, interviewing the Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, sports psychologist Michael Gervais and best-selling author and ultra-athlete Rich Roll, among 30+ others. We also interviewed Jordan Burroughs.
In February of 2018, I moved back to Chicago and Tommy Tahoe continued on with the podcast, which he still does to this day under the name Millennial Momentum. It’s an outstanding podcast.
Once I got settled into Chicago, now living a mile from Tanner which was awesome, I knew I wanted to run a podcast and decided to focus solely on my passion in life – wrestling. Thus, the Wrestling Mind podcast was created. I did 8 or so interviews (Tom Ryan, Jake Herbert and Sergei Beloglazov to name a few) before changing the name to Wrestling Changed My Life. The reason being is that I wanted the name to convey the theme of the podcast, which to me is interviewing wrestlers to explore their journey through the sport and how wrestling shaped them into the person they are now. The focus wasn’t going to be about scores and highlights, plus I also wanted to talk about more than just wrestling. I wanted to talk about how our great sport impacted who they are as a person.
That brings us to today. As I’m writing this the 2019 World Championships are about to start, and the podcast has been absolutely booming lately thanks to YOU! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you listening to the show, recommending guests and sharing the clips I post on social.
I hope you enjoy the podcast and please reach out for recommendations or just to say what’s up.
