COACHBOBBUBB A year to honor legends...

Fans packed into Tippin Gymnasium Jan. 30, 2022. Alumni from eras spanning more than 50 years gathered from around the country, and welI-wishes poured in from the world over.

Prior to the scheduled wrestling match against Kent State, the athletics department formally unveiled the Robert G. Bubb Wrestling Facility, named for longtime Golden Eagles head wrestling coach Bob Bubb.

A video presentation enumerated Bubb’s many accomplishments as the Golden Eagles head coach. In 26 years at the helm, Bubb turned a small college in Pennsylvania into a hub of the college wrestling world. Clarion boasted seven Division I national champions and 27 Division I All-Americans in that time. As a team, the Golden Eagles finished the NCAA Division I Championships in the top 10 four times and in the top 15 eight times in his tenure, including a fourth-place finish in 1973. The 1986 Division I Coach of the Year, Bubb was one of only four coaches in Division I history to have recorded more than 300 career dual wins when he retired in 1992.

Bubb showed his gratitude for the honor while also crediting seemingly everyone except himself.

“Those of you here today know that Clarion’s wrestling success from '66 to '92 lies not with one man,” Bubb said. “We were a program, and a whole. But in making that whole, there were so many pieces that ultimately made that whole.”

Bubb quoted from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” speech, specifically the “Man in the Arena” section. These words hung in the Tippin wrestling room during Bubb’s tenure as coach and after:

“It is not the critic who counts ... the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood: who strives valiantly ... and spends himself in a worthy cause.”