Once 'really scared to do great things,' Arrowhead grad Keegan O'Toole is a 2-time NCAA champ with Olympic dreams

Keegan O’Toole, a four-time state champion at Arrowhead High School, added a second NCAA title to his ever-growing résumé over the weekend, going back-to-back for Missouri at 165 pounds in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

O’Toole scored an 8-2 victory over top-seeded David Carr of Iowa State, who’d handed O’Toole his only two losses of the season, in a dual meet and in the Big 12 championship match a month earlier at the same venue.

The victory over Carr, the 2021 champion at 157 pounds, was a testament to the progress O’Toole (20-2) was able to make in a short time, he said after the match. And some of the credit for that ability to grow quickly belongs to another former Warhawk and Tigers champion, Ben Askren, who has mentored and trained with O’Toole to prepare him as much mentally as physically.

O’Toole, the 18th wrestler from Wisconsin to win four state high school championships, became the third Missouri wrestler to win multiple titles, following Askren (2006 and ’07) and J'den Cox (2014, 2016, 2017).

In an interview Monday, O’Toole talked about preparing to face Carr for the third time, his plans for the future and his relationship with the Askren Wrestling Academy, which took “a kid who was willing to work really hard but that also was really scared to do great things.”

What have the past few days been like?

Enjoyment. Grateful.

Happy that I was even 1) able to experience the tournament again, and 2) know that I got a lot better and made a lot of corrections in my last match, just because I had lost to him twice before.

You mentioned after the match how much you improved. How do you do that?

Definitely being very specific because in big matches details are what’s really important. Also, just being in the wrestling room and being coachable, listening to people around me and believing what they’re telling me. Ultimately those were the key takeaways I took from the past month and a half.

What’s the process of dissecting mistakes? Does it come from inside? From coaches? From tape?

Definitely me and my coaches. I go back and watch.

I know exactly what I did right and wrong usually pretty immediately after a match and then it’s just a matter of going back in the wrestling room and working on those specific things and the more you spend time in those areas, the better you’re going to get. That’s the formula.

You have two NCAA championships, three appearances (third place in 2021), so what’s next? What do you want to accomplish over the next year, two years, four years?

I want to try to still become the best person I can be. It’s a constant battle. My faith in God, always struggle with temptations, all those things, so that’s a constant battle and I want to continue every day to try to be better at that.

And then also obviously I want to keep wrestling as long as I can. I want to win the next two NCAA tournaments. I want to wrestle in the Olympics one day.

I also want to try to be the best student I can be and excel at whatever profession or whatever internships I would get in the coming years.

Do you know where you’re headed academically?

My major is personal financial planning as an undergrad. Then I’m going to get my master’s in my fifth year of school in the science of business and I might have two graduate certificates in tax emphasis and maybe some sort of medical supply chain or something like that.

That’s got to be a heck of a juggling act to have that planned out, to do all the work while also trying to win national championships and get to the Olympics. How’s the balance?

Balancing is very important.

Immediately during the beginning of the week I always try to get all my schoolwork done just because, 1) I know if I attack it right away it’s going to be done for the week and 2) also, I’m more focused in the beginning of the week than I am at the end of the week, looking forward to the weekend maybe. So I always try to get that done first.

And then training, that’s a constant battle. There’s so many different kinds of training. Obviously I wrestle, but I also lift, condition, working on your mental game. Balancing it, I feel like I’ve done a decent job over the years but obviously there’s always room for improvement.

And I would say with me the biggest room for improvement right now is technically I need to get a lot better and I think mentally I still need to get a lot better.

This is an oversimplified question that doesn’t have an easy answer, but what do you need to do or what’s the biggest obstacle to that goal of the Olympics?

Just battling the internal doubt, fear, just because no matter how hard you work on that there’s always going to be those elements there.

But also just the fact that the United States is really, really good at wrestling and whoever enters the tournament when it comes time to make the Olympics is going to be really, unbelievably good.

So I’m trying to be the best version of myself that I can be and believe that I can make the team and then go win Olympic gold for my country.

You mentioned, several times (after winning Saturday) the Askrens. How did you get connected?

I think I was 12 years old when I went to my first Askren practice and fell in love with it right away. Me and Ben definitely have grown over the years and coach (John) Mesenbrink. It’s been a blessing to be a part of that, and I definitely am eternally grateful to those guys and I try to help them as much as I can as I get older because they’ve done so much for me and I would love to return the favor in any way possible.

Did you grow up anywhere near those guys, or did you just make the connection because of wrestling or because of Arrowhead?

When I (had just) started wrestling, Askren wasn’t open. So they opened in 2011. I started wrestling in 2008. So those three years I was going to different clubs.

Shortly after they opened I just was close (living in Milwaukee), like 40 minutes away before I moved. So we would make that drive, and then when we moved out to the Arrowhead School District and I was only 10 minutes away.

We didn’t just move out there for me wrestling. It was really good for my family too because my dad was a fireman for the City of Milwaukee, and they had regulations to where they had to live within city limits. Then they lifted those regulations and my dad really wanted to move out of the city and Hartland was a nice area.

And what it is about Ben or the program that works for you specifically?

For me personally they were able to take a kid who was willing to work really hard but that also was really scared to do great things. Just mentally … I had a lot of mental roadblocks and challenges and they were really able to dig down and dig deep and have me admit the root cause of things. Subconsciously I might not know what I’m doing.

Their intelligence and their passion, and they were so charismatic to me – both Ben and Coach Mensenbrink – and they just helped me … almost rebuild myself from inside out. Instead of trying to put masks over those problems, I had to dig deep and find out the problems for myself.

For me that was probably the biggest breakthrough that I’ve had and then on top of that just their sheer knowledge of wrestling and how good those two made me when I was younger.

That’s interesting. It’s been more of a psychology benefit than specifically wrestling?

Yeah. Most outsiders looking into high-level athletics … don’t understand that working hard and putting time in the wrestling room is the easy part but the really difficult part is being able to apply those things you learn to competition and then to life and then working on your mental battle.

Internal battles with your own thoughts are much more difficult than physical battles.

It’s very easy to go into the wrestling room and do a practice, but if I’m not paying attention, if I’m not thinking about the right things or if I’m worried about outcomes, if I’m worried about possible opponents or things that I can’t control, then I’m not maximizing my time and that’s all internal. There’s nothing external about that.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Former Arrowhead wrestler Keegan O'Toole wins 2nd NCAA title