To be an Individual State champion takes years of hard work and no days off. To be a four-time State champion takes a life dedicated to wrestling. Of Wisconsin’s 31 four-time State Champions, Pierce County hosts three of them, in River Falls’ Kevin Black, Ellsworth’s Jens Lantz and Ellsworth/Prescott’s Sam Stuhl.

Black, who went an absurd 160-0 in high school (1995-98), said it all started with him and his brother tagging along to practices when his dad was a coach.

“We tackled each other all day long and wrestled on the floor, and my mom got mad at us,” Black said. “We would just tag along with my dad to practices, and then when we were young, I got a chance to wrestle when I was in kindergarten.”

Growing up on a dairy farm, Black was instilled with hard-working values, never missed a day of school K-12 and still holds onto the attitude that helped get him this far.

“We had a little bit of that farmer mentality,” Black said. “My attitude in wrestling was show up, do your work and it kind of trickled over into the way that I approached school and everything.”

After graduation, Black became an All-American wrestler for the Wisconsin Badgers, coached River Falls for 10 years and has three kids in the River Falls school system. Black was a major advocate for the introduction of high school girls wrestling in Wisconsin and coached women’s wrestler Helen Maroulis at the Rio De Janeiro Olympics in 2016.

“When I was a little kid, I always knew I wanted to be a coach,” Black said. “There’s a lot of really cool education experiences to be able to teach kids about the sport, learning, the process.”

Black’s education background has led him in the direction of coaching, and he has coached wrestlers non-stop every day because of it.

In many sports, but wrestling especially, the greats never truly say goodbye to the sport. Black, Lantz and Stuhl have experienced that firsthand.

“It’s all-encompassing. It’s a total body, mind and soul experience like no other sport,” Black said. “If you’re a marathon runner, there’s a lot of distance type stuff. If you’re a powerlifter, there’s a lot of power type things. Wrestling balances everything pretty evenly.”

Black said the sport demands a lot mentally with weight management, individual and team aspects and the grind of a match.

“It’s a love-hate relationship, to be honest, but it sets you up so well for life. The saying goes, wrestling is life. You wrestle with a lot of things in life, and it doesn’t make it any easier, but because of the things you go through in wrestling, the sacrifices, the discipline, the heartaches, the success, you understand how to navigate life.”

Like Black, Lantz got started with life on the farm. His parents were heavily into wrestling, and he has lived and breathed it for his entire life.

“I just had a lot of good people around me to steer me in the right direction at a young age. Obviously, coming from Ellsworth, we had a really rich tradition of wrestling, so I had a lot of good mentors,” Lantz said. “Discipline was the biggest thing. It was a lot of sacrifice.”

He went 160-8 from 2011-14, but he took it one day at a time and one match at a time. The key was enjoying the process more than the outcome.

“The most important match of your life is the one you’re in right now. You never know when you can have a breakthrough moment or something like that in the practice room,” Lantz said.

While knowing the current generation of Ellsworth wrestlers look up to him means a lot, Lantz said it could not have been done without all of the positive influences in his life.

“It’s pretty special, but at the same time, it was the people that came before me that even allowed me to pursue these opportunities,” Lantz said. “I hope that me going and accomplishing that and then Sam Stuhl shortly after that just shows that you can do it in a small community like this, but it does take a lot of sacrifice.”

Having those people surrounding him growing up made him want to give back and get into coaching.

“Some people say [wrestling is] not for everybody, but I believe it should be for everybody because of the life lessons it can teach you,” Lantz said.

Stuhl won a State title for Prescott in his freshman season in 2015 and followed it with three more for Ellsworth, compiling a 170-12 record. His mother’s family was big into wrestling, so it was always a part of his DNA.

He went on to wrestle for six years in college with NDSU and then Augsburg, where he won individual and team National Championships. He was college teammates with his younger brother Charlie, eventually coaching him in his final season at Augsburg.

“I don’t think that wrestling will ever leave my life,” Stuhl said. “I just think it’s the best sport in the world. What’s so special about it is that anyone can thrive at it.”

It does not matter your height, weight or build, anyone can be the best wrestler in the State.

“The best wrestler doesn’t always win,” Stuhl said. “It doesn’t matter how hard you work, it might just be the other person’s day. That’s the sport of wrestling. It’s an unforgiving sport.”

He recalled Gable Stevenson, an Olympic Champion that nearly everyone predicted to win his final Collegiate National Championship, being upset by Oklahoma State’s Wyatt Hendrickson. While not many believed in Hendrickson, the only thing that mattered was that Hendrickson believed in Hendrickson.

Stuhl became known for an absolute refusal to give up, and scoring four points in the final six seconds of the State Championship in his junior season to rally back for a win was just one example in a long list.

“You could be down 14-0, you could be down 10-0, if there’s time on the clock, you can still win the match,” Stuhl said.

“There’s no secret ingredient, secret move that’s going to get it done. It’s just believing you can do it, believing in the work that you put in,” Stuhl said. “You just, no matter what, have to believe that you’re the best.”