Mar 17, 2026 By Joe Smeltzer 7 min read

Rocco Welsh just kept doing pushups.

Up.

Down.

Up again.

Down again.

Up once more.

Down.

Finally, Welsh couldn’t do it anymore.

Welsh should be able to do a lot of pushups without stopping.

After all, Penn State wrestling’s 184-pounder was a two-time state champion and four-time state finalist at Waynesburg Central High School and is now one of the best college wrestlers in the country.

So what was the big deal?

“I mean, he was like three years old,” Welsh’s father, Denny, remembers.

OK, maybe he wasn’t three.

“I would say maybe four or five years old,” Welsh’s older brother, Tony, who is now the head wrestling coach of Waynesburg Central, said.

How many pushups he’d do also depends on who you’d ask.

“I would say at least 40 or 50,” Tony Welsh said, “he’d just keep going.”

“It was more than 50,” Denny Welsh said. “I didn’t start counting till after he did a bunch of them.”

In any case, Welsh’s strength and stamina have never been normal.

“He would just be able to go forever, you know,” Denny Welsh said, “and we just sit there and count, and we’re like, ‘I don’t think he gets tired.’ He just was able to pump them out. It was crazy.”

With Rocco being the youngest of four, Tony Welsh remembers him feeling he had something to prove.

“He’s definitely got toughened up through growing up in our house, for sure,” Tony Welsh said.

With less than two full college seasons under his belt — he redshirted his second season at Ohio State last year- Rocco Welsh has already made it to an NCAA Division I championship match, finished a regular season undefeated, and, most recently, won a Big Ten title.

Greene County is known for two things: Hard work and great wrestling.

Welsh has provided both, and it started from a young age.

Around the same time Welsh was wowing everybody with his pushups, he would wear his father’s — who was a coal miner – hard hat, along with work boots, “and tape up his pant legs like the coal miners do,” Denny Welsh remembers.

Rocco would then work in the backyard with his father’s tools and build a bomb shelter using the sandstone that was around the area.

More than a decade and a half later, Rocco Welsh is still working, and this time, he’s doing it in front of thousands of people on some of wrestling’s biggest stages.

Full throttle

The only time Denny Welsh remembers seeing his son “almost break” during his high school career was when he would put himself on a treadmill at full speed for two two-minute periods to simulate the length of a wrestling match.

After this, the treadmill would go off, and Welsh would get a five-to-10-second break.

After that, the treadmill came back on for another two minutes, full speed, completing the three periods that are in a wrestling match.

Still, this wasn’t enough.

“And then, we would go to overtime,” Denny Welsh said.

Overtime is something Rocco Welsh has experienced multiple times in his college career.

As a true freshman at Ohio State, five of Welsh’s bouts went to sudden victory, and he won four of them.

At Penn State, four of his matches have gone to either sudden victory or a tiebreaker, and he’s won all four.

Welsh wouldn’t be able to get those wins if he weren’t built for it, and he wouldn’t be built for it if not for that work ethic.

Scott Rhodes, who coached Welsh in middle school and then at Waynesburg Central (junior and senior year), remembers how Welsh would prepare himself.

“He would lift in the morning,” Rhodes said, “do our practice at three o’clock in the afternoon, and then leave and go to his club. So it was like three practices a day. And I am not saying he does that now because when you get older, you can’t really go that hard, but I am sure that it’s still there – that drive.”

Indeed, it is.

Exceeding the limit

Welsh’s work ethic has impressed even one of the greatest college wrestlers of all time.

Per Denny Welsh, after Rocco transferred to Penn State, he would get calls from PSU great Carter Starocci, the only five-time national champion in Division I history, to go to Penn State’s wrestling room and practice.

Not a big deal, except that these calls would sometimes happen in the middle of the night.

Once the practices started, neither of the 2024 NCAA finalists at 174 pounds wanted to give up.

“Finally, I think one of the coaches, I think (Penn State associate head coach) Casey Cunningham said, ‘You know, you can’t … you’re overdoing it,” Denny Welsh said.

Rocco Welsh’s drive is something that stuck out to Starocci right away.

“That’s my guy,” Starocci, who still lives in the State College area, told Nittany Sports Now in October.

“If you text him in the morning, he’s down to go. … If you hit him up at night, he’s down to go,” Starocci said. “I mean, I’ve been around the block a few times, and there’s not many guys that are willing to do that. So I can really tell that he really wants to be great. “

For Starocci, Welsh’s mindset will take him to the top of the mountain.

“I think, for him, you’re looking at the next 184-pound NCAA champ,” he said.

Never satisfied

Welsh has had a great season, no question about it.

But he wants to be more dominant – his 52.38 bonus-point percentage is the lowest of any of Penn State’s seven No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Championships – and he knows what he has to do to make that happen.

“It’s really just getting back to work, ” Welsh said last weekend after winning the Big Ten title. “It’s really just opening up. I have such good offense. When I just let it go, it’s a pretty cool thing to see. So, I’m just not happy with the way I’m kind of holding back a little bit, a little hesitant. So I need to start letting go and get the offense going.”

This week in Cleveland – the NCAA Championships will be held Thursday through Saturday – Welsh will attempt to do something only a previous few wrestlers from Washington or Greene counties have done: Win a national championship. He is the top seed at 184 and takes a 20-0 record into the tournament.

Rhodes, who was an assistant at Jefferson-Morgan in the early 1990s, coached Cary Kolat, who won four state championships at Jefferson-Morgan and two NCAA titles at Lock Haven, and although he didn’t make a direct comparison, he sees some similarities in how Welsh and Kolat go about their business. Kolat is currently the head coach at the Naval Academy.

“There is not (another) Cary Kolat, nor maybe will there ever be another Cary Kolat,” Rhodes said. “But, there were certain things that Rocco did that his drive was just superior to a lot of wrestlers. … You didn’t have to force him to do anything. He would do it on his own, and he would want to learn on his own, and he would lift on his own. … He put a lot of things upon himself to get better at the sport.”

Welsh has two seasons of eligibility left after this one, and thus, his college wrestling legacy is far from complete.

But no matter what happens, he won’t forget where he came from and how it shaped him.

“My grandpa, my dad and my uncle are all coal miners,” Welsh said last month. “It’s just a tough area. Everyone’s hard workers. So I think Waynesburg as a whole just breeds good wrestlers, tough kids. Even the kids that aren’t wrestlers are pretty tough kids. So I think it makes it easy for a sport like wrestling, where you have to be tough.”