2000-Ned Shuck

"It's a Great Day to be an Adult and an Eagle"

(Note: The legend of Ned Shuck’s work ethic began in the late 90s when he put in endless time before and after school and before and after the wrestling season. As a young teacher frantically trying to put together enough material to fill the day, I greeted Ned most mornings as he was running the stairs before the break of dawn. The mantra “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” pushed Ned to the highest of highs yet it also became a burdensome millstone around his neck that almost broke him before he developed a new goal beyond just winning.)

The Hero’s Journey

In the concept of the Hero’s Journey, the path of the protagonist often sees the hero come full-circle during the course of their life. In ancient Greece, audiences would root for the hero to conquer the monster and then leer when hubris turned the hero into the villain. On November 15th, Ned Shuck’s wrestling career also came full-circle as his Bellarmine wrestling team battled the monstrous Iowa Hawkeyes, Ned’s alma mater where he wrestled as a walk-on. 

The results of this David-Goliath matchup?

According to Shuck: the score doesn’t really matter–it's the pursuit.

Another factor on the Hero’s Journey is the innate “character flaw” that drives the hero to great heights before ultimately ruining the hero with a one way ticket back to anonymity or tragedy. Heroes that cannot overcome this flaw are often doomed.

The Call to Adventure

For Shuck, wrestling was the only adventure he needed to understand. His solitary goal? Winning a state championship. “To be honest with you, the thing that stood out most to me was all the training I did in the mornings in the school. There was nobody there, but maybe a janitor or Mr. Herbst or Mr. Annis would happen to work out. My coach, Jason Ficket, was there in the morning working out too. But outside of that, there really wasn't anybody there. I just remember running the hallways and using that as my training.  I was just training for a very specific goal, which was definitely too narrowly focused on winning the state title.” Folks at Maple River from 1997-2000 could see the steely-eyed determination from Shuck, and when he qualified for the state wrestling tournament his junior and senior year, the community supported his quest. Even though Ned finished in second place as a junior and third place as a senior, his narrow focus led to inner turmoil. “I was super dialed in on winning a state title.  I still remember my junior year, losing that match and going off into a tunnel, getting away from my coaches and just screaming, crying and, you know, cursing God, like, “How could you do this? How?”  That was such a painful moment for me because I identified myself solely as a wrestler. That was my quest, and that was it! Nothing else mattered other than my family and my loved ones. But it was in that moment that I really feel like He kind of slapped me upside the head.” 

The Refusal of the Call

Heroes are often reluctant to walk a challenging path. While the rest of Shuck’s classmates were filling out scholarship forms and making plans for the next stage of life, he struggled to find a new purpose. As a result, he paid little attention to what he needed to do to continue wrestling. “I was very naive to the college process and didn't really use the guidance counseling office to kind of help with that. I don't know how many athletes we had at that time going on to wrestle at the division one level. I knew there was a softball player before me and probably a couple others, but nobody in my family had ever gone to a four year college program either.”  From skipping orientation to missing deadlines, Shuck almost derailed a career in wrestling before it began. “So I drive four hours down to Iowa City to go check in the class. And they're like, ‘Alright, what do you want to major in?’ Well, I thought I was going to be really smart and clever. I was like, ‘I want to be a Physical Education teacher.’ And then I thought, you know, I gotta be marketable, right? So I needed to say health teacher too, right? Now they looked at me and they said, ‘We don't have that here. Oh, okay. I was like, thinking in my mind: this is a Big 10 school with 40,000 students here. You don't have physical education? How's that even possible?” Shuck finally signed up as an elementary education major and took care of his classes–only to find out he needed to sign up for housing, too.  “And I'm like, ‘so when do I figure out what dorm I'm in all that?’ And they're like, ‘you're not getting in the dorms; they don't have any space.’ So then I had to find housing, and it was just a mess, you know? So that transition into it was brutal.”

Meeting the Mentor

Whether the hero is Luke Skywalker or Odysseus, the young hero often needs some veteran guidance on the journey. For Ned Shuck, his early mentor was Coach Jason Ficket. Along with helping Ned get two shots at the state championship, Coach Ficket was also there to push him on his adventure in wrestling when Shuck placed 2nd in an NHSCA tournament. From talking Shuck through the next steps at college to putting him in the bright spotlight, Ficket made sure the young apprentice had a shot. “I remember very distinctly walking into his classroom and him having the phone already up to his ear. ‘Yeah, this is Jason Ficket. I have a recruit here ready to talk to Jim Zaleski. Is he available?’ And he just handed me the phone. And I was like, ‘Oh, hey, Coach Zaleski.’”

After making introductions, Shuck figured out “the college life” and also found a whole new set of mentors at Iowa. “But my wrestling experience there was incredible. I took in a ton. Loved my time there with the coaches, and that whole experience about being a part of a team that was constantly fighting for a national championship–I wouldn't take that back. I really appreciate my time there, and set me up for my career now. And had I not been there, I don't know that that would have been the case.”

Crossing the Threshold

By 2005, Shuck had wrestled his last match at Iowa, and after years of being a wrestler, he suddenly had to focus on the next step in life. Luckily, his time at Iowa taught him more than just how to be a good wrestler; he also learned how to be a good student. “ So it was a little brutal, but I had fun and learned a lot. Learned a lot about what not to do. I was an excellent student in college, you know, I realized I had to pay for it. I was paying out of state tuition, no scholarship, and so I got myself into a ton of debt from that, which wasn't great, but ultimately I graduated with much, much better  grades than I had in high school.” And after more than a decade of being coached, Shuck suddenly had to walk his own path.  “Those experiences in high school and in college have really helped me, give me perspective now as a coach, what I'm doing now to really get back my kids on a much higher level. Out of college, I just thought, ‘Well, alright, I'm going to take over a subpar type of program and make it into the national championship high school level program,’ right?”

Tests, allies, and enemies 

Although Shuck had offers for several coaching jobs after his time in Iowa, he chose to return home to Minnesota, even though it meant he had to seek his Masters in Special Education to complement his Iowa Teaching License. At Chaska, he served as a middle school special education teacher and worked with another wrestling mentor. “I just felt like Minnesota was home to me and wanted to go back there and got a job at Chaska teaching. I was a middle school special education teacher. I got a chance to work with Mike Houck, who was the first champion in Greco Roman wrestling, and he was an Olympic Training Center coach for about four or five years. And so I just fell into a guy that had incredible knowledge and an incredible coach that really mentored me as a head coach at the high school level right out of college, and a great relationship I have today that he's still a mentor of mine. We had a pretty cool group of kids in high school. One of them's gone on to make four world teams in Greco so super excited about that. And I had a couple other wrestlers go on to wrestling college. RJ Holman is another one. He went and wrestled for Iowa State. We had a good time there, but, you know, kind of a weird situation. We had a lot of parents that were supportive of us, but we had a couple that didn't. They got the ear of the administration and actually I got fired, you know, as my coaching job." Even though Chaska tried to rehire Shuck later, he turned them down. Despite the setback, Shuck would soon find success down another path.

The Reward

Shuck’s dream–a dream of coaching a championship high school team–simply had to be adjusted. First, he realized that to improve himself, he needed to humble himself to learn from others, which meant the next few years would be serving as an assistant coach. Also, Shuck realized that the high school gig might not be the right dream. “It was day one in the room there at Augsburg that I realized God's got a plan here, and college wrestling is really the better fit for me. I just loved it. I love my time. Had some great people to work with. There were obviously some great kids. We had multiple kids win a national title and a team title there. So that was fun.”

His patience quickly paid off, and soon a head coaching opportunity presented itself. “ And I was looking to get a  head coaching job and was able to get one at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, a small DIII school of about 1100 students. We built that up and got that going, created a really cool culture guys that I still stay really, really tightly connected to today. We had a ton of fun and trained really, really hard, won a couple conference championships right away with that, and then I had an opportunity in University of Wisconsin Whitewater a little closer to home, and took that and was there for four and a half years and won. We did a lot of winning there. We beat Wartburg, which was a team that's consistently been on top. They hadn't been beaten, I think, in a number of years at that time.”

Having been tested by successes and failures, Shuck finally turned his sights to coaching at a Division One program, which turned out to be at West Point. “That's where I went for the next three years as associate head coach at West Point. A pretty amazing opportunity there too, just an absolutely phenomenal place, just incredible people, incredible wrestlers that have service to country in mind, and met some amazing people that have done some incredible things for our country and just our world in general.” 

The Innermost Cave

None of these victories–including the next coaching opportunity just around the corner–would have been possible if Shuck didn’t adjust his definition of success. In the hero’s journey, the biggest monster is often found within. Looking back at the angry young man who finished second place at the MSHSL State Wrestling tournament, Shuck recognized the value of the journey more than the goal. “Ultimately, I look back at what I was really pursuing: it's not that important. It's the pursuit. It's all the things that went into it and the people that went into me and were important to me who helped me be the best–there was a ton of value in that.” 

Shuck also credits growing in his faith as an important change since high school. “You know, I had faith in high school, and I knew Christ as my Savior, and that was something that was important to me. But as you get older and you experience different things: loss, success, heart-ache and adversity, jubilation, all that, when you experience all those ups and downs, you get to experience life at a different level. And I think one of the things I've really grown at is just being able to give that up to Christ and just let him know I need your help. I need you. And it's tough times praising him for all the blessings, all the things that I have because I'm super, super grateful for, I said, just the health of my family alone as I kept, you know, I'm so grateful for that, because I see, I see a lot of people, you know, struggling with the health side of things. And you know, when you don't have your health, like, focused only on your health, because you're just trying to get healthy. And, you know, we're able to kind of enjoy some other things because we are. And so just, just really grateful for that. 

And so I think the most that I've grown, you know, because that that's a big focus of mine, is that, yeah, I have peace, you know, I have peace with Christ, and I have peace and full of challenges that I have and, and, you know, all the trials and, and also all the successes that him to thank for, for everything, and when I get, when I get down and out, when that time happens, and I'm, I'm struggling, you know, I can lean on him and know that wants me to do that, and he's here to think about me and care about me.”

The Return

Shuck now calls Bellarmine University his home, where he lives with his wife and two sons. While his extended family still lives in Minnesota, he brought a little bit of Minnesota with him to Kentucky by marrying Jennifer Struve, a state champion gymnast from WEM. His sons, Lucas and Micah, now reap the benefits of Shuck’s acquired wisdom. “They're having a blast doing all kinds of sports they're doing. My youngest is doing football, soccer and wrestling. My oldest is doing soccer and wrestling. And so it's good, good father-son time with them to be able to be able to be in the wrestling room together and share that time together. But yeah, both of them are super, super artistic. They love drawing. They love making and creating things. A different skill set than I have. My wife is very artistic, and so they kind of got that side from her, for sure.” 

Even though Shuck’s career took him away from Maple River, he still follows his high school’s successes, and he gushed about the tennis team winning a state championship and remembers Maple River with a great deal of nostalgia. “I just have a lot of pride. You know the smell of popcorn going into the gym, coming out of the locker room, getting ready for our home duals, the band playing at the home duals. Like, those are all things for me. I just look back, it was such a cool time. And I think even then, like, you don't really understand or appreciate the value and the people that around you, but I just felt so much support from all the faculty there, but also the student body, you know, having a couple busses of people come up to watch me at the state tournament like it was so I was just surreal to think that, you know, that that's the kind of support you can get in the small town community. And I love that, and I miss that a little bit too, right?”

Shuck is trying to bring a little bit of Maple River with him to Bellarmine. “This is our first season of postseason eligibility here. I've been here for almost three and a half years now, but this is going into my fourth season, and things have been going, you know, really well here. We have beaten every team in our conference, except the top two, in a dual. So looking to keep leveling up there, but excited to see what our team can do.”

And how better for young heroes to test themselves than by battling monsters? On paper, Bellarmine fell to Iowa 49-0 but not a single Knight went down without giving the Hawkeyes their best. Shuck also gave his new community his best, making the matchup an event for the community with smoke, lights, and pyrotechnics while also setting an attendance record for the program. And Iowa gave Ned its best, bringing the icon Dan Gable to help celebrate Bellarmine’s big weekend, which also included hosting a leadership academy for Kentucky wrestling coaches. “We've created an awesome culture here, too, with this team, 59 guys on the team right now, so we got a big team and, man, they're just incredible kids doing the right things on and off the mat. And I'm just having a lot of fun with them. So it's a pretty fulfilling career for me right now that I'm really enjoying. We're just trying to take it day by day right now and keep building, keep doing the right things.”

(Coach Shuck presented Iowa legend Dan Gable a customized Louisville slugger to thank him for his visit to Bellarmine.)

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