Chance Ruble just sent a big message to all college wrestling coaches from his performance at Fargo.
Last year’s trip to Fargo was one that Chance Ruble still remembers for the wrong reasons — an early exit and no medals.
This year, the Seckman standout went back to North Dakota and came back with a pair of All-American medals and a national championship as well.
The sophomore-to-be at the St. Louis area school won the 150-pound 16U Greco-Roman championship USA Wrestling 16U National Championships held at the FargoDome in Fargo, N.D.
“I wanted to place pretty high this year,” Ruble said. “Last year, I went 3-2 in freestyle and 4-2 in Greco and I was done. Coming into this year, I knew it was going to be a tough tournament, but I knew I could place in the top three in both styles. It’s pretty crazy being a national champion; I never knew it would come this early but I knew I could do it.”
Ruble put together quite a run in North Dakota that came after an early loss in freestyle.
He won out from there to take third and never lost in Greco-Roman — a 17-match winning streak. Ruble said he started feeling his chances for a national championship once he got to the quarterfinals needing three more wins to secure the crown.
For the most part, his run to the Greco title featured pretty decisive wins for Ruble. His first four wins were by 8-0 or 9-0. In the quarterfinals, Ruble dispatched Titus Norman from Tennessee, 8-6. In the semifinals, Ruble built a 7-0 lead over Emerson Tjaden of Kansas and held on for a 7-5 win. In the championship, Ruble secured a 9-0 win over Dokken Biladeau from Iowa.
“He’s the type of kid that listens to everything I said and whatever I told him to do, he did it,” Coach Ryan Moyer said. “He did everything I asked this summer and everything leading to (Fargo). Every time we had a match, I’d go through and watch film on the kids and we’d come up with a game plan and he stuck to the game plan.”
Moyer said this was the first wrestler he coached that won at Fargo and only the second national champion he’s guided.
“I think I was a little bit more excited than he was when he won it,” Moyer said with a laugh.
Moyer knows how tough it is to compete at Fargo and he never had that type of success there, though was a college All-American at Lindenwood. He came up with the game plan against Biladeau in the finals that if he could get him turned to go to the gut wrenches — a key to a lot of Ruble’s success.
Moyer said Ruble’s goal was to take control of matches early, score first and control the center of the match and then dominate when he got top.
The national championship is something that will be etched his the record books, but his run to medal in the freestyle one is also very memorable.
He lost 5-4 to Indiana’s Carter Fielden in the first match in the round of 128.
Ruble never lost again.
He won 10-0; 13-2; 12-0 and 10-0 and then things got tricky. Down 13-10 to Pennsylvania’s Luke Knox, Ruble got two takedowns in the final minute and won 18-13.
Facing New Jesery’s Luke Scholz, he won on criteria and advanced in the 5-5 match.
“It meant a lot because I knew I could do it but I had some really close matches,” Ruble said. “It’s just the speed of it and I mean, you’re weaseling pretty good guys every match and it gets tough … pretty tough.”
A disqualification followed and then shutout wins, 11-0 and 10-0, to get to the third-place match. There, a close match with Eli Esguerra of Ohio ended with a 10-8 win by Ruble.
For Moyer, the determination that Ruble showed wrestling back was a sign of progress.
Flashback to February. The freshman made the 138-pound semifinals in Class 4 but lost and then kept losing, finishing sixth overall in his first trip to the MSHSAA finals.
“To see him come all the way back for third is nice,” Moyer said. “When you’re getting towards the end and even though you’re in shape and you’re ready to go, your body’s been through a lot over the last five days with making weight, maintaining weight, wrestling all those matches and doing all that. So for him, mentally, to stay in it and be prepared was pretty awesome.”
Ruble said he spent most of his time wrestling with Team Missouri Select at CBC, but he also went down to Hillsboro to workout at Thoroughbred Wrestling Academy with Coach Marcus Hayne. Before Fargo, he went 5-4 in Greco and 7-1 in freestyle at the 16U National Duals in Tulsa. He won both Greco and Freestyle at the USA Wrestling Southern Plains Regionals in Mulvane, Kansas, in June.
“He dedicated himself a lot more than what he had in the past,” Moyer said. “Last year he was an eighth grader going into this tournament and just be able to work with him this year and working with great partners all year, you just grown. Even this summer, he got to work with some of the best kids in the St. Louis area in our TMS room and working with those kids just get you to that next level. He was training freestyle and Greco four days a week rather than only two.”
His next wrestling match will be the Super 32 Challenge in October in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Moyer said leading up to football, Ruble would often go to football camp and then do wrestling practice, or vice versa.
“To see that and to see the dedication and he never complained and never said one thing wrong,” Moyer said.
Now, Ruble is in football mode, going to Seckman team camp as soon as he gets back from North Dakota. He’s a running back for Seckman and has some big shoes to fill on the field in terms of his last name.
His older brother, Cole, was a standout player for the Jaguars. Cole ran for 2,524 yards and 46 touchdowns in 2022 and was an all-state football player. He left Seckman as the all-time leading rusher in school history and currently plays at Southeast Missouri State University.
“Always living in o your brother’s shadow,” Moyer said of the brothers, who both wrestled. “His brother, football was always the No. 1 and it showed. That’s why he’s playing D-1 football now. With Chance, his passion is wrestling and he wants to go to a big D-1 school.”
