PITTSBURGH, PA – Dozens of wresters will be “coming home” for the NCAA Championships in Pittsburgh next week, but Pitt’s Kellan Stout beat them there by a full two seasons.

The redshirt junior, who started at Penn State before transferring closer to his Mount Lebanon home, received an at-large bid for at 197 pounds.

“That’s kind of a dream come true,” Stout said of making his first NCAA Championships appearance in his hometown. “It’s never happened before. The timing of it, the transfer, getting the bid. It seems like a good story. A long story, but a good story. It’s treat to have to have the ability to compete in front a lot of people that I know.”

Coming out of high school, Stout was one of the top recruits in the country – FloWrestling had him at No. 59 in the class of 2015 – after he went 138-18 at Mount Lebanon. Stout was 38-0 as a senior and won the Class AAA title in Hershey.

He went 17-8 in open tournaments in two years at Penn State, including his redshirt season. When he transferred to Pitt, there were high expectations that he’d make an immediate impact for new coach Keith Gavin, but that didn’t happen as Stout went 4-16 in his first season in a Pitt uniform.

 

‘He was right there’

“He lost a lot of those matches, but he was in a lot of those matches,” Gavin said Thursday in a phone interview with PA Power Wrestling. “It wasn’t like he was getting crushed. His win-loss record was very lopsided, but he lost a lot of tight matches. He was right there. He just made an adjustment.”

Despite his struggles on the mat, Stout never lost confidence in himself.

“It’s hard, but I never really doubted my skills,” he said.

He believed in himself, in his coaching staff and his teammates, including Nino Bonaccorsi, who is a national qualifier at 184 pounds as a redshirt freshman this season.

“I think last year, it was his first time in the lineup,” Gavin said of Stout. “At Penn State he redshirted and he was behind someone. That was his first real season (in 2017-18). And I think with transferring back to his hometown, there was added pressure. We told him that was just in his head.

“Kellan’s a pretty intelligent kid, and he’s also very mature. He was able to get himself through that. We just kept encouraging him. I think that speaks to his maturity.”

 

‘A work in progress’

Gavin and Stout each mentioned how the contrast in styles between Bonaccorsi – who launches non-stop leg attacks from the neutral position – and Stout has helped both improve.

“We have to get creative to get better to score on each other,” Stout said.

Stout certainly seems to have gotten a lot better this season. His 12-8 mark includes about a half-dozen quality wins.

“He’s had a much better year this year, but it’s not perfect,” Gavin said. “It’s still a work in progress.”

That was evident at the ACC Tournament, where Stout went 0-2 as the fourth seed. He dropped a 4-3 match to No. 5 seed Alec Schenk of Duke, then fell by the same score to second-seeded Tom Sleigh of Virginia Tech. Coincidentally, Sleigh will be Stout’s first-round opponent in the NCAA Championships.

 

Ready to Scrap

While Stout thinks he wrestled Sleigh tougher at the ACC Tournament than he did earlier in the season, he’s not sure if it’s beneficial to face someone in back-to-back matches two weeks apart.

“I think there’s advantages to wrestling someone new as well as someone you’ve wrestled before,” Stout said. “You take some of that scouting – What is this going to do? How can I react? – out of it. You just go out and scrap.”

While getting a spot in the NCAA Championships has always been hard, this year might be the most difficult it’s ever been to get a seat at nationals. The fact that it’s in his hometown means that Stout has heard from plenty of folks wanting help with getting tickets.

“We only get so many tickets, and a lot of people are trying to come,” he said. “We’re trying to keep it to friends and family, but it’s Pittsburgh. Everybody wants to come.”