DevilsDigest Exit Interviews: Tanner Hall

Tanner Hall, the 2020 Pac-12 Heavyweight champion, finished his graduate student year with a record of 23-3 and is currently training in Arizona to punch his ticket to the Tokyo Olympics next summer.

DevilsDigest: We'll start off with the lockdown, what have you been doing since the end of the wrestling season?

Tanner Hall: It's ever-changing. When the lockdown first started, we were prepping for the NCAA tournament. We just finished [the] Pac-12 [championships], we had won the Pac-12 title as a team, and I won as an individual. I was in the weight room lifting, preparing myself for nationals. And for the first time and maybe since I've been here; the TV was on in the weight room to something other than lifting. I think it was ESPN, and they were announcing that one of the conferences just canceled their conference championship for basketball. And once we saw that we knew it probably wasn't very good. I think it was later the next day they canceled the national wrestling championship. It was kind of a bummer. And then you know, finishing my senior year as a master's student and Electrical Engineering, that wasn't too bad. I've had enough online classes over my time here, and then everything kind of shut down completely. Gyms were closed, wrestling rooms are closed, you can't go anywhere, it was all on your own. I actually ended up going back home for what I thought was going to be about two weeks…I ended up staying home for about two months. It was good to be home that much. But I was kind of itching to get back into the room and into the program.

DD: So you were in Idaho for most of it?

TH: Yup. Meridian- basically Boise if you don't know where that is. About a month ago, things started opening back up and then we were able to find places to train and things to do. It's been improving every day, which is good.

DD: There were a lot of program milestones during your five years on the wrestling team. Do you have one or a couple of moments that stood out to you as your favorites?

TH: There's a couple of different things, there were moments that were team related; there were moments that I cherished individually. I took third at NCAAs my sophomore year. That was pretty cool. I had a good tournament; I had some tough matches. The final match especially, it was going back and forth a lot. It went into overtime and came down to the last second. Typically, at 90% of tournaments, once heavyweight rolls around, nobody's paying attention. Half of the people have left because the guy they're watching is gone. It was kind of cool because this was a third-place match, and the other two matches had finished before us because we went to overtime. I remember after my hand got raised, I looked in the crowd, and there were still several thousand people sitting there and watching.

Team-wise, there's a bunch: winning the Pac-12 three times was pretty cool, beating Penn State was awesome. The biggest home crowd we've ever had, definitely the biggest match we've ever had. And we ended up winning. It was a special moment. So there's lots of little cool things that have transpired since I've been on the program.

DD: In your time at ASU, was there a person, professor, coach or friend that had a serious impact on your life?

TH: I think it's a team effort. There were certain individuals that mentored me in certain circumstances. There were certain times where some people were better equipped to handle the circumstance I was going through in terms of advice, or whatever it may be. I'm not sure if I could ever single out one. I could talk about all four of our coaches that we had. I could talk about my teammates that helped me through different places; I could talk about friends and people at school or other athletes. We're a pretty big family, and there was there were lots of good mentor moments between me and other people.

DD: Outside of wrestling- how was your experience at ASU? Were there things or events that stood out to you?

TH: There's a strong church presence out here for me, and so that was fun getting to know a lot of people in the church out here and getting to associate with them. Of course, there's a lot of other athletes at ASU who are fun to be around- and something that I really appreciated was when we would become friends with athletes from different sports and go to volleyball games. They would come to our wrestling matches or gymnast meets or stuff like that. Everyone was able to support each other, which was a lot of fun.

You can't just, at least for me, can't be wrestling all day every day, 24/7, and you don't want to be in engineering all day either. My engineering friends were a good break from the athletic lifestyle. It was easy to relax and to kind of get away from that for a little bit, and vice versa. They both worked in tandem like that a little bit. But there were lots of little things I would say. If I had to summarize it, just probably just the friends I've made since I've been out here. That's probably the biggest thing that's stood out to me since I've been here.

DD: Take me back six or six-and-a-half years ago when you were being recruited. Do you remember that time, and do you remember thinking, this is the place for me?

TH: That's a funny story. I graduated high school; I went to the Olympic Training Center for two years, then I did a two-year mission [in Uganda] for my church, then I went to ASU. The reason why it's a funny story is right out of high school, I got recruited to come to Arizona State, and ASU was actually the first one I said "No" to. I came home from the visit and told my parents, "No. It's not going to happen."

So I went on my mission spent time at the [Olympic Training Center], and when I came back, [ASU Wrestling Head Coach] Zeke [Jones] reached out to me, and he's like, "Hey, you want to come on and take a visit to Arizona State?" And I was just like, dude, I've already gone there once I really don't want to go. I didn't even want to take a visit there. I'd already seen that I really didn't care. But this time it was a little different. I think the culture changed a little bit among the wrestling team. I saw some things that I didn't get to see before. When I came back from that recruiting visit, several years ago, the first time I sat down, I'm thinking, I hated this so much the first time, and I really enjoyed it the second time, I knew pretty much immediately this was going to be the place for me. Still, in my head, I was laughing–this is the first place I told no, and this is the first place where I really felt like it fits.

DD: How would you explain the culture now versus when you first visited before your mission?

TH: When we came in as freshmen, I don't know what we were ranked the year before. It wasn't high. It was like 70 or something. It wasn't very impressive at all. And now, we left being actual champions, having several individual champions, being ranked as high as third or fourth in the nation at one point, and beating Penn State. The culture has changed drastically, and people have expectations now: "Oh, man, this guy's from ASU, we expect him to be good, we expect him to be tough." We expect ASU to come out here and there's a little bit of fear to ASU's name, which I would say which is a good thing. People look and go "We don't want to wrestle ASU, they're tough they're gonna beat us." The culture shift in that regard has been fantastic.

DD: I'll move to ASU and Tempe- is there a favorite place on or off-campus that you would pick?

TH: I definitely can't call it my favorite place, but the place where I spent the most time on campus was definitely the electrical engineering lab in [The ASU] Goldwater [Center for Science and Engineering]. I was in that lab more than I care to remember, just labs upon labs for days. That's the thing with electrical engineering, you walk in at 2 in the afternoon thinking you'll be out by 5, and you're walking out at 10:30, still not done (laughing). I'll say that was definitely the place where I spent the most time on campus.

DD: You had a great career, you've blazed the path for future heavyweights at ASU like Cohlton Schultz, are you excited for these young guys?

TH: I think he's going to be fantastic. I think he's going to find a lot of success. He'll be one of the fan favorites, and ASU won't be missing the heavyweight anytime soon. I think Cohlton's going to do a fantastic job of stepping in and filling the spot that I leave. He is in a fantastic place to be, and I don't think I trade it for anything else. The athletic program we got here from the top down, starting with Ray Anderson and the athletic department. It's something really that you see that most people don't see. It's really important, you go to Oklahoma State, or Ohio State or a lot of these other really big schools and the kids in their athletic program don't even know really who their athletic directors are, or ever really see them- much less have a relationship with them. From the top down, it's not just some athletic director who you know his name, and that's it, but these people you see and have personal relationships with them. And at least to me-maybe it's because I was a little bit older-that meant a lot to me, and I really appreciated that.