Football recruiting flips make for big headlines, but Ohio State's wrestling coaches aren't unfamiliar with the task of wooing top talent away from other marquee programs.
It looks like Tom Ryan and Anthony Ralph may be on the verge of doing it again, as former Iowa commit Ryan Sokol announced that he has reopened his recruitment just days after a visit to Columbus. FloWrestling has Sokol tabbed as the No. 10 overall recruit in the class of 2021.
"It was a hard choice," Sokol wrote in a text message to the Des Moines Register. "The Iowa community was great to me. I just wanted to open up my recruitment a bit and see what's out there."
According to the Register, Sokol visited Ohio State, where high school teammate Daniel Kerkvliet is training as a true freshman. Sokol, a rising junior at Simely High School in Minnesota, won a Cadet Freestyle national championship in 2017, and was a member of the 2019 Cadet Freestyle World team at 65 kg (a weight wrestled by Buckeye Alumni Logan Stieber, who recently opened an elite training academy in Columbus, and Joey McKenna, who is moving from the Ohio RTC to the Pennsylvania RTC).
Sokol will wrestle inside Iowa's Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Oc.t 5, for FloWrestling's "Who's Number One" event, where he'll compete for the No. 1 ranking at 138 pounds. He is slated to take a trip to Iowa City again on Oct. 19 for an official visit; he told Flo that he has no other visits scheduled at this time.
He hosted Iowa head coach Terry Brands and assistant coach Ryan Morningstar for an in-home visit late last week, ahead of his visit to Columbus.
